They open up the possibility of an evolutionary link with the oldest known Homo sapiens fossils – those from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, dated to around 315,000 years ago. These discoveries help clarify ...

We could learn something from them.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine are private, nonprofit institutions that provide expert advice on some of the most pressing challenges facing the nation and world. Our ...

Two fossil skulls discovered in Yunxian, northern China, are now dated to approximately 1.77 million years ago, making them the oldest known hominin remains in eastern Asia. The new findings overturn ...

What if Homo erectus (H. erectus), the direct ancestor of modern humans, arrived in China much earlier than we thought? Research published in Science Advances may rewrite our understanding of early ...

The preference of some mosquitoes in the Anopheles leucosphyrus (Leucosphyrus) group—including those that transmit ...

In 1970, the renowned paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey found an ancient, nondescript leg bone sitting on the ground in Ileret, Kenya. Now, 53 years on, a research team has found marks on the bone they ...

Human footprints stir the imagination. They invite you to follow, to guess what someone was doing and where they were going. Fossilized footprints preserved in rock do the same – they record instants ...

Human footprints stir the imagination. They invite you to follow, to guess what someone was doing and where they were going. Fossilized footprints preserved in rock do the same — they record instants ...

A Cambridge University researcher has digitally reconstructed the missing soft tissue of an early human ancestor – or hominin – for the first time, revealing a capability to stand as erect as we do ...

“The March of progress”, created by Rudolph Zallinger in 1965, is an image that has launched a thousand T-shirts. It shows a line-up of six figures. The first is hunched and ape-like. The rest become ...

Recently, a man visiting his parents’ newly renovated home recognized an eerily familiar white curve in their tile floor. To the man, a dentist, it looked just like a jawbone. He could even count the ...