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Researchers propose a stunning new theory for why Neanderthals and humans started to bury their dead at the same time.
In the heart of the Zagros Mountains, ancient humans might have crossed paths with Neanderthals, leaving genetic imprints that survive in many people today.
New studies show that Neanderthals and humans shared northern Europe for thousands of years.
They lived around the time the first humans started to appear in Africa.
Stone tools and a tooth found in a cave in France open up new questions on human history
Nothing actually new under the sun, but the new designation aims to clear a lot of confusion surrounding the human family tree.
Some scientists believe we've found our long-lost sister lineage. But not everyone is entirely convinced.
Tree ring-like growth lines in baby Neanderthal teeth suggest they were first weaned at around 6 months of age.
Whenever distinct groups of humans and their ancestors overlapped in space and time, interbreeding was just around the corner.
These were the hi-tech gadgets of the Upper Paleolithic
A new lineage of humans has been identified in the DNA of certain African populations. But no one knows what they looked like or what happened to them.
Was this an isolated individual, or part of an earlier wave of human migration?
The humans had to become very efficient in order to survive.
We're taking you for a ride through evolutionary memory lane, carefully listing the members of our long family tree.
A tiny fingerbone is re-writing the story of human dispersal out of Africa.
Cheeky new details concerning the interbreeding between Neanderthals and our own species.
Our ancestors interbred both with Neanderthals and Denisovans.
A 200,000-year-old human jawbone found in a cave in Israel is rewriting history.
A lot has changed in 30.000 years.
Yet another sign that the two species from the same Homo genus were very similar to one another.
Dibs on the last slice.
The most comprehensive bone analysis of its kind shows Homo floresiensis didn't share important features with Homo erectus.
No one knows who the direct ancestor of Neanderthals is but this skull might help shed light.
The fact that the greatest biodiversity of large mammals we know of today is recorded in Africa is a legacy of past human activity, not climate or environmental phenomena, new study reveals. The paper theorizes at how the world today would look if Homo sapiens had never existed. In a previous analysis, the researchers from Aarhus Univeristy, Denmark, they showed how the mass extinction of large mammals during the last Ice Age and the subsequent millennia, most notably the late-Quaternary megafauna extinction, is largely explainable by the expansion of modern humans across the world.
A broken jaw unearthed in Ethiopia pushes back the origin of the homo linage – of which homo sapiens sapiens are the only surviving members – by 400,000 years. The finding might prove important in explaining how our ancestors diverged from more apelike relatives, like Australopithecus, to big brained beings, filling a blank spot two […]
A partial skull fragment found in Kenya seems to indicate that early humans were much more diverse than previously thought. The 22,000-year-old skull clearly belongs to a human species, but is unlike anything else previously discovered.
After analyzing key hand bone fragments from fossil records, a team of anthropologists conclude that pre-homo human ancestral species, such as Australopithecus africanus, used a hand posture very similar to that of modern humans. Considering fossil tools used for scrubbing off meat as old as 3.3 million years have been found, it may just be that our early ancestors weren't all that different from good ol' superior homo sapiens sapiens. Well, as far as hands go at least.
Advancements in genetic sequencing has allowed genomic research to flourish. DNA sequencing is now much faster, cheaper and accurate than ever before, and we’re only now beginning to reap the rewards. It’s the first step to a complete understanding of our bodies. The Human Genome Project, once finally completed, mapped and identified all the genes of […]
Researchers have found obsidian spearheads dated 85.000 years ago before the development of Homo Sapiens (280.000 years ago). This is a very complicated process, requiring numerous steps and lots of concentration and skill This has 2 possible explanations: either humans evolved much earlier than previously believed, either another species had advanced craftsmanship skills […]
A common assumption in human evolution is that our early ancestors first developed bipedal locomotion and only then did they developed dexterous hands capable of using tools, since these were free to be used no longer being required for walking. A new research by a team of Japanese scientists proved this long-standing assumption wrong, however, […]
Human hair found in fossilized hyena poop suggests that ancient humans were sometimes on the menu of other animals. The fossilized dung, part of a “hyena latrine,” will be described in the upcoming October issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science; the sample has been subjected to a number of tests. The sample is about […]
German scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig have completed the first high-quality draft Neanderthal genome sequence, marking another leap forward in understanding our fellow hominids and how our species interacted, if there was such thing, with other hominid species. Moreover, the whole Neanderthal genome has been made freely available to the […]
Early humans developed sophisticated hunting weapons half a million years ago, 200.000 years before researchers believed they did. As surprising as it may be, humans aren’t the only species who used spears: Western Chimpanzees have also been observed to do it, breaking straight limbs off trees, stripping them of the bark then sharpening with their […]
According to a new study conducted by Professor Gerald Crabtree, who heads a genetics laboratory at Stanford University in California, humans have peaked their intellectual capacities thousands of years ago, and now we are in a slow, but certain, state of decline. The provocative theory comes from one of the leading minds in genetics, and […]
An incredible find was publicized just earlier – fossils remains from stone age people were unearthed from two caves in China. Upon further inspection it was found that the bone features, particularly skulls, were unlike any other human or early ancestor remains ever found, suggesting that the researchers may have actually found a new species […]
Last year, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, produced a draft of the Denisova genome, in order study in what proportion they relate to homo sapiens sapiens. The Denisovans, are a new group of hominids, discovered just two years ago, which is believed to have lived around 30,000 years ago, alongside Neanderthals and […]
A fresh look at some already known fossilized remains revealed quite a surprise: they turned out to be the earliest people in Europe. From analyzing stone tools and other such artifacts, researchers have long believed the earliest Homo Sapiens to settle on the continent some 42-44.000 years ago; the only problem is, there were no […]
Humanity’s right handedness began at least 500.000 years ago, according to a new study conducted by University of Kansas researchers. The right handed trait is believed to actually be a “side effects” of the development of language. “We are right-handed because the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body, and […]
I recently came across this poll, which was conducted about a year ago. Ok, so it’s not extremely actual, but one year can’t change the data significantly. So, almost 1 in 3 Texans believes that humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time, and over half of them don’t believe humans evolved from […]
By all standards, at some point, Neanderthals were better prepared for life than any other human species; however, in spite of all this, they were extinct, while ‘we’ fluorished; the reason why this happened is still pretty much a mystery, but as always, some theories have been made. One of the most accepted ones was […]
Svante Paabo, the researcher whose work provided the basis for the Jurassic Park movies seems to have struck gold once again; this time it’s about a finger bone older than 30.000 years, found in the Altai mountains, that as far as DNA analysis has shown, belongs to no known species of humans. They also found […]
[digg-me] [reddit-me]After it was proved that Homo floresiensis (”Man of Flores”, nicknamed Hobbit) is a different species than humans, the tiny skeletons found in the caves of the Pacific islands of Palau let to the theory that similar remains found in Indonesia are a very unique species. The Palau skeletons which are from 900 and […]
