A new analysis of genetic studies proposes that the cognitive capacity for language was already present at least 135,000 years ago.

On Valentine’s Day in 2018, a team of scientists walked across a flat expanse in the badlands of northeastern Ethiopia, scanning the ground for fossils. An eagle-eyed field assistant, Omar Abdulla, ...

For decades, a neat story about human origins has floated through textbooks and documentaries: modern humans emerged in East Africa, then spread south later. It’s clean, familiar, and easy to repeat.

A fossil ape discovered in northern Egypt is reshaping the story of human evolution. The species, Masripithecus, lived about 17 to 18 million years ago and may sit very close to the ancestor of all ...

In 1758, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus gave humans a scientific name: Homo sapiens, which means "wise human" in Latin. Although Linnaeus grouped humans with other apes, it was English biologist ...

A fossil found in northern Egypt from a new species, Masripithecus moghraensis, is changing long held ideas about ape and human origins.

The museum’s groundbreaking Hall of Human Origins centers around the adaptations that set early humans apart Jack Tamisiea What does it mean to be human? This question, deceptively simple and imbued ...

For decades, the dominant theory in human evolution suggested that modern humans descended from a single ancestral lineage in Africa. However, groundbreaking new research from the University of ...

A fossil cranium, which is around 1 million years old and was initially believed to belong to Homo erectus, is now thought to be part of the Asian longi clade, closely linked to the Denisovans, which ...

Throughout most of human history, evolution progressed slowly. Small genetic changes took thousands of years to permeate populations. Natural selection was intentional, reactive, and gradual. However, ...

(Volodymyr Yakimchuk/Creatas Video+/Getty Images Plus) A seismic shift in the selection pressures acting on humans may have ...