Human Origins

An ancient grape seed found at the Lake Hula site

The Paleo Diet May Need a Rewrite, Ancient Humans Feasted on a Wide Variety of Plants

Archaeologists in Israel have counted 55 species of plant foods a an early hominid site on Lake Hula

New Dictionary Explains 45,000 English and Irish Surnames

Using sources dating back to the 11th century, researchers have put together the massive Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland

Human and Neanderthal skulls

Why Humans Don't Have More Neanderthal DNA

The mutations humans acquired from Neanderthals are slowly being purged from the genome overtime

The Warryti Rock Shelter in the Flinders Range

Aboriginal Australians Lived In Country's Interior 10,000 Years Earlier Than Thought

Excavations at a rock shelter in the Flinders Range shows people were there 49,000 years ago, hunting megafauna and developing new tools

Striations on teeth of a Homo habilis fossil 1.8 million years old suggest the earliest evidence in the fossil record for right-handedness. Researchers believe the marks came from using a tool to try to cut food being pulled from the mouth with the left hand.

Two-Million-Year-Old Jaw Has a Lot to Say About the Origins of Human Handedness

Scientists have discovered one of the earliest examples of handedness in an ancient human

Neanderthals May Have Given Us Both Good Genes and Nasty Diseases

DNA analysis shows ancient hominds transmitted genes that may have helped us adapt quicker to Europe and Asia. They also gave us HPV.

Campsite Places Humans in Argentina 14,000 Years Ago

Excavations at the site Arroyo Seco 2 include stone tools and evidence that humans were hunting giant sloths, giant armadillos and extinct horse species

A reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology.

Hear the Recreated Voice of Ötzi the Iceman

Using CT scans of the Neolithic man's vocal tract, Italian researchers have approximated the way he pronounced his vowels

Welcome the First "Three-Parent" Baby Into the World

Fertility doctor John Zhang and his team transplanted DNA from one egg to another to prevent a fatal mitochondrial disease

Aboriginal rock art at Ubirr in Kakadu National Park.

New DNA Analysis Shows Aboriginal Australians Are the World's Oldest Society

The group was the first to split after a single wave of migration out of Africa took place between 51,000 and 72,000 years ago, study shows

World's Oldest Fish Hooks Discovered in Okinawa

The 23,000-year-old barbs are made from snail shell. The discovery shows that early people had the resources to survive on the isolated island

A 3,000-year-old clay pot with cheese residue found burnt to the bottom.

Archaeologists Find Ancient Pot With Traces of 3,000-Year-Old Burnt Cheese

This ancient mishap gives researchers a peek into Bronze Age life

OSRIS-REx

Watch OSIRIS-REx Head to the Cosmos to Grab a Scoop of Asteroid Dust

Today, NASA will launch the spacecraft which will travel to the nearby asteroid Bennu

Reconstruction of Lucy’s vertical deceleration event, by the authors of the new study.

Did Anthropologists Just Solve the 3-Million-Year-Old Mystery of Lucy’s Death?

Researchers think they've reconstructed the fatal plunge and last terrifying seconds of the hominin's life

A reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology.

DNA Analysis Reveals What Ötzi the Iceman Wore to His Grave

He rocked surprisingly complex fashion for the Copper Age

A view of the area of the ice-free corridor today

First Humans Entered the Americas Along the Coast, Not Through the Ice

Evidence mounts against the traditional story of early human migration through an ice corridor

An ancient stone tool used to butcher a rhinoceros.

Ancient Hominids Used These 250,000-Year-Old Tools for Butchery

Traces of blood on the prehistoric tools, suggest our ancestors had a much more varied diet than once thought

The ancient carving after it was vandalized by well-intentioned youth.

One of the Earliest Images of Skiing Was Destroyed by Youths Trying to “Improve It”

The petroglyph was made 5,000 years ago

Sully Vent in the Main Endeavour Vent Field in the northeast Pacific, similar to the environment LUCA would have lived

Behold LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of Life on Earth

New discoveries suggest life likely descends from the inhospitable environment of deep sea vents

An artist's reconstruction of what the hobbit may have looked like housed in Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

The “Hobbit” Lineage May Be Much Older Than Previously Thought

A new find hints that the short-statured hominins could have been living in Indonesia over a half a million years earlier than previous estimates

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