This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

"The Giant Leap," by astrobiologist Caleb Scharf, is an optimistic account of our widening journey into the cosmos.

Animated three-dimensional illustrations present the evolution of mankind from the earliest animal in the earliest days of life on Earth.

For decades, the dominant theory in human evolution suggested that modern humans descended from a single ancestral lineage in Africa. However, groundbreaking new research from the University of ...

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.

A composite view of the Earth constructed by NASA from multiple satellite images Editor at Large Human evolution is a story writ slow. It’s been about 3.8 billion years since life on Earth emerged and ...

"Consciousness," although challenging to define, can be thought of as a first-person awareness of one's surroundings and oneself. You sense the world through your eyes, nose, ears and hands, and track ...

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and ...

A series of whole genome and gene duplication events that go back hundreds of millions of years have laid the foundations for tissue-specific gene expression, according to a new study. The 'copy-paste ...

In 1758, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus gave humans a scientific name: Homo sapiens, which means "wise human" in Latin. Although Linnaeus grouped humans with other apes, it was English biologist ...

One of the biggest mysteries in human evolution has just been solved. In 2010, a groundbreaking genetic analysis revealed that east Asia was once home to a previously unknown group of enigmatic ...