A skull fragment discovered over fifty years ago on the banks of the Elbe River in Germany has finally yielded its secrets. Long considered by some researchers to be a rare Neanderthal-modern human ...

New 3D analysis of a German skull clears up decades of confusion, placing this human firmly in the modern family tree.

How far back in evolutionary history does kissing go? Through phylogenetic analysis, an international team of scientists found that kissing was likely present in the ancestor of all apes – which lived ...

The terms hominid and hominin are often used interchangeably, but they do not mean the same thing. Hominids include all great ...

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and ...

In 2024, a group of paleontologists journeyed into the dry, sandy desert of northern Egypt in search of fossils in a valley called Wadi Moghra. Scientists had previously found ancient monkey remains ...

The human body is full of evolutionary compromises. The loss of the tail may be one of the clearest examples of how change ...

The human body is often described as a marvel of "perfect design": elegant, efficient and finely tuned for its purpose. Yet, ...