A mystery that started with the discovery of a pinkie finger bone in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia may finally have been cracked.

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 ...

A foot fossil found in Ethiopia belonged to an ancient human. The finding could knock one of the most famous names in human evolution from her spot on the family tree.

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 ...

Australian researchers think the skeleton found in South Africa is not the same species as two found in the same South Africa cave system ...

Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same place ...

In 1990, a farmer in central China stumbled on a skull so battered it looked more like a pancake than a fossil. For decades, scientists squinted at the flattened bones of “Yunxian 2,” guessing it ...

Smithsonian paleoanthropologists explore how the year brought us closer to understanding ancient human relatives and origins Ryan McRae and Briana Pobiner A young chimpanzee looks on during an outing ...