An international study changes the view that exposure to the toxic metal lead is largely a post-industrial phenomenon. The research reveals that our human ancestors were periodically exposed to lead ...

Combining archaeological evidence with ancient DNA and data on past climates shows us how long and winding the story of human evolution is, stretching back millions of years to when the first primates ...

The pelvis is often called the keystone of upright locomotion. More than any other part of our lower body, it has been radically altered over millions of years to allow us to accomplish our bizarre ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

How did humans become human? Understanding when, where and in what environmental conditions our early ancestors lived is central to solving the puzzle of human evolution. Unfortunately, pinning down a ...

Natural selection has long been considered the driving force behind human evolution. But a landmark study of 87 fossil skulls spanning the past two million years suggests the story is far more complex ...

In a recent study published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution, researchers examined the differences in circadian biology between the ancestors of modern humans and the archaic hominins such ...

South Africa has one of the world’s richest fossil records of hominins (humans and their fossil ancestors). But many misconceptions still exist regarding human evolution, and school textbooks contain ...