Researchers found that ancient hominids—including early humans—were exposed to lead throughout childhood, leaving chemical traces in fossil teeth. Experiments suggest this exposure may have driven ...

In southern Africa, a group of people lived in partial isolation for hundreds of thousands of years. This is shown in a new study based on analyses of the genomes of 28 people who lived between 10,200 ...

In his new BBC show, Jim Al-Khalili journeys through hundreds of millions of years of brain evolution. Live Science spoke to him about what he learned along the way and how this knowledge sheds new ...

Something about a warm, flickering campfire draws in modern humans. Where did that uniquely human impulse come from? How did our ancestors learn to make fire? How long have they been making it?

The oldest distinguishing feature between humans and our ape cousins is our ability to walk on two legs—a trait known as bipedalism. Among mammals, only humans and our ancestors perform this atypical ...

As our evolution slows and industrialization and technology accelerates, a growing body of research suggests that human biology is struggling to keep pace. Many of the chronic stress-related health ...

Recent fossil finds could mean that "Lucy" wasn't our direct ancestor, some scientists say. Others strongly disagree. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

It is fair to say that the family tree of ancient humans is not written in stone. Just take the case of the Denisovans, the enigmatic ancient humans who were, until recently, known only from a few ...

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 ...

A new study from Northwestern University is reshaping how scientists think about brain evolution. The research suggests that ...

Scientists working in Ethiopia's Afar Region have made discoveries that rewrite our understanding of early human history. For ...