This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have evolved testicles of all different sizes. In almost all these separate cases, ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to ...

Human placentas produce exceptionally high hormone levels that may have driven our brain evolution, not male competition as traditionally thought These pregnancy hormones directly influence fetal ...

Revolutionary fossil evidence from Ethiopia is challenging decades of scientific consensus about human origins. New discoveries suggest that the famous Lucy fossil, long considered a direct ancestor ...

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 ...

Researchers have uncovered new insights into a long-lost human species known for their particularly hefty craniums, according to a recent study. The Julurens — or “big head” people — are twisting ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

The skull had the brow of a descendant but the face of an ancestor. When researchers finished reconstructing the DAN5/P1 cranium from Ethiopia’s Afar region, dated to between 1.6 and 1.5 million years ...