Anthropology | featured news

Humanity's right-hand dominance might be more than 500,000 years old, new research indicates. The trait of right-handedness is commonly believed to be a sign of the development of another uniquely human trait — language.

Some 11,500 years ago one of America's earliest families laid the remains of a 3-year-old child to rest in their home in what is now Alaska. The discovery of that burial is shedding new light on the life and times of the early settlers who crossed from Asia to the New World, researchers report in Friday's edition of the journal Science....

A team of researchers who got a first look at a foot bone from famous fossil Lucy who lived 3 million or more years ago, and concluded this ancestor was fully comfortable with life on the ground, rather than in the trees.

Neanderthals cooked and ate plants and vegetables, a new study of their remains reveals.

A maternal ancestor to all living humans called mitochondrial Eve likely lived about 200,000 years ago, at roughly the same time anatomically modern humans are believed to have emerged, a new review study confirms.

Human ancestors used stone tools and ate meat at least 800,000 years earlier than thought, scientists say.

Ancient humans ventured into northern Europe far earlier than previously thought, settling on England's east coast more than 800,000 years ago, scientists said.

Tibetans may have undergone one of the fastest bouts of human evolution on record: Those having genes that allow them to thrive at high altitudes ...

Siberia's Denisova cave held the pinky bone of an unknown early human species, a genetics team reported in March. The Naturejournal study, led by Johannes Krause of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, offered no answer for what happened to this "archaic" human species, more than one million years old and living near their human and Neanderthal cousins as recently as 30,000 years ago.

A shrunken brain may potentially lie inside the fossil skull of a newfound candidate for the immediate ancestor to the human lineage, researchers now reveal. This new species, dubbed Australopithecus sediba, was accidentally discovered in South Africa by the 9-year-old son of a scientist. Two members of this hominid were introduced to the world last week — a juvenile male and an adult female, who might have known each other in life and who could have met their demise by falling into the remains of the cave where they were discovered.