Anthropology, Humans | featured news

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.

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.

A fossil skeleton of a child discovered in a cave system known as the Cradle of Humankind may represent a previously unknown stage in the evolution of man, The (London) Sunday Times reported. The skeleton, which is almost complete despite being two million years old, is believed to belong to one of the hominid groups that includes humans.

Humans have long been advised to "know thyself," but new research suggests we may not know ourselves as well as we think we do. While individuals may be more accurate at assessing their own neurotic traits, such as anxiety, it seems friends, and even strangers, are often better barometers of traits such as intelligence, creativity and extroversion.

The genomes of four Bushmen and one Bantu were sequenced or partially sequenced. 'If we really want to understand human diversity, we need ... to study those people,' lead author of the study says. By Thomas H. Maugh II Scientists have long known that ...

Ardi lived 4.4 million years ago in the woodlands of East Africa. She spent most of her time in the trees. She stood about four feet tall, weighed 110 pounds, and had long arms, short legs, and a grasping big toe that was perfect for ...

Newly analyzed remains suggest that a modern human killed a Neanderthal man in what is now Iraq between 50,000 and 75,000 years ago.