Neanderthals are of course extinct. But there never were very many of them, new research concludes.
Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits.
A 35,000-year-old flute made of vulture bone found in a cave in southwestern Germany is the world's oldest known musical instrument.
Researchers who tickled 25 juvenile apes – including three human infants – and recorded the sounds they made say that laughter seems to be shared by all great apes. That would mean laughter dates back some 10 to 16 million years, to our common ancestor.
No one would mistake the Stone Age ivory carving for a Venus de Milo. The voluptuous woman depicted is, to say the least, earthier, with huge, projecting breasts and sexually explicit genitals.
Locations for the Garden of Eden have been offered many times before, but seldom in the somewhat inhospitable borderland where Angola and Namibia meet.
Six years after their discovery, the extinct little people nicknamed hobbits who once occupied the Indonesian island of Flores remain mystifying anomalies in human evolution, out of place in time and geography, their ancestry unknown.
It's a mystery first of all how H. floresiensis (the "hobbit" species of the Homo genus) could develop a tool-making tradition despite its small brain size. And it's yet another mystery why modern humans that arrived later in the island of Flores adopted the same type of tools.
Primatologists call at least some of the things that happen on social networks "grooming". In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps.
Ever since researchers discovered in the 1970s that humans lacked the genetic variation expected of our population size, they have proposed that our ancestors went through a big squeeze: Volcanic eruptions, disease, or climate change created a population "bottleneck" that reduced …
Lots of things that lots of people believed for a long time turn out to be completely off the mark: The Earth is the center of the universe. Heat and light are two different things. Tomatoes are vegetables. Humanity consists of five or six discrete groups classified by skin color.
Scholars previously thought that Homo sapiens migrated out from sub-Saharan Africa (the evolutionary origin) by following the Nile river corridor. Recent paleoclimate information suggest that this may not have been the only path taken.
A classic experiment exploring the origin of life has, more than a half-century later, yielded new results. More Articles
These days almost everyone gets to hand their genes on through their children.
"The theory of invasion is an invention. This invention is necessary because of a gratuitous assumption that the Indo-Germanic people are the purest of the modern representation of the original Aryan race. The theory is a perversion of scientific investigation.
Metin Eren just spent three years in his lab living like a Neanderthal—or at least working like one.
Research by UK and American scientists has struck another blow to the theory that Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) became extinct because they were less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens).
Neanderthals were not as stupid as they have been portrayed, according to a study showing their stone tools were just as good as those made by the early ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens.
The world's first known modern human was a tall, thin individual -- probably male -- who lived around 200,000 years ago and resembled present-day Ethiopians, save for one important difference: He retained a few primitive characteristics associated with Neanderthals, according to …
Did the first modern humans in Europe share a bed with nearby Neanderthals? Almost certainly not, according to a new analysis of 28,000 year old Cro-Magnon DNA.
Language and associated activities, such as singing, likely emerged well before the first modern humans set foot on Earth. A new study found that a Neanderthal relative possessed hearing consistent with individuals that communicate by speaking.
Part of our strong curiosity about chimps and other primates is the striking similarities we hold with them.
...a virtual global journey of modern man over the last 150,000 years. The map will show for the first time the interaction of migration and climate over this period. We are the descendants of a few small groups of tropical Africans who united in the face of adversity....
Scientists describe the fossils of small-bodied humans from the Micronesian island of Palau. These people inhabited the island between 1400 and 3000 years ago and share some -- although not all -- features with the H. floresiensis specimens.