A fossil jaw of a distant human relative was discovered much farther north than previously thought possible, revealing new ...

At some point in the deep past, humans may have come frighteningly close to disappearing altogether. Here’s what we know, ...

Our species, Homo sapiens, has been evolving for more than 300,000 years, but the story of human origins starts much earlier.

Long before humans became master hunters, our ancestors were already thriving by making the most of what nature left behind. New research suggests that scavenging animal carcasses wasn’t a desperate ...

Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same place ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts—from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain—have been assembled in fits and starts over the 4 billion years of our ...

The Trump Administration recently called out the Smithsonian Institution for pushing “one-sided, divisive political narratives,” leading GOP Sen. Jim Banks last week to introduce a bill prohibiting ...

As humanity prepares to take its first steps on Mars, a comprehensive report released by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and steered by scientists at Penn State lays out ...

WASHINGTON — The search for past or present life should be the top science objective of future human missions to Mars, a new National Academies report concludes. The report, A Science Strategy for the ...

Science fiction often shows aliens with human features like eyes, limbs, and faces. But science has a reason for questioning ...