The idea of a rapid human transformation, which supposedly turned our ancestors into modern beings around 50,000 years ago, ...

An international study of infant remains from 50,000–75,000 years ago has provided new evidence about the developmental ...

While analytical methods portray skeletal sex differences as almost purely binary (female or male), a person's sex—including ...

The basic outline of the interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals is now well established. The two came in contact as modern humans began their major expansion out of Africa, which occurred ...

New fossil discoveries are reshaping scientists’ understanding of a pivotal chapter in human evolution, revealing that ...

Scientists have long debated how modern humans evolved. For decades, most researchers agreed that Homo sapiens came from one ancestral group in Africa, dating back 200,000 to 300,000 years. But new ...

Modern human faces are surprisingly delicate compared with the jutting jaws and broad noses of our closest extinct cousins. The contrast is not just cosmetic, it reflects deep differences in growth, ...

Neanderthals, the closest cousins of modern humans, lived in parts of Europe and Asia until their extinction some 30,000 years ago. Genetic studies are revealing ever more about the links between ...

Two of the traits that set modern humans apart from non-human primates are taller stature and a higher basal metabolic rate. Researchers have identified a genetic variant that contributed to the ...

Denisovans, a mysterious human relative, left behind far more than a handful of fossils—they left genetic fingerprints in modern humans across the globe. Multiple interbreeding events with distinct ...

Until now, at least 14 different species have been assigned to the genus Homo since it emerged in Ethiopia some 2.8 million years ago, revealing branching evolutionary stories of survival, intermixing ...