When paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey discovered the 1.8 million-year-old Homo habilis in 1964, it was thought to be our first human ancestor. Because of its close proximity to stone tools, Homo ...

Homo habilis may not have been the "king" of the forest, according to a new study published in the journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. The study focuses on evidence that reveals that ...

A transitional fossil in a period we have little on “One of paleoanthropology’s main research goals has been to fiddle the temporal and evolutionary gap between these early and later phenomena,” ...

In 2003, archaeologists from Indonesia and Australia discovered the bones of a new species of human, named Homo floresiensis, in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Its short stature – about ...

Found in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, Homo habilis marked the dawn of the human genus. Known as the “handy man,” this early ancestor carved the world’s first stone tools, shaping both the landscape and ...

Dr. Jeffrey Schwartz PhD is professor of biological anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One consequence of continually lumping new specimens into a few species is ...

These files consist of 3D scans of historical objects in the collections of the Smithsonian and may be downloaded by you only for non-commercial, educational, and ...

65 million years ago, a catastrophic asteroid strike wiped out not only the dinosaurs, but practically every animal weighing over 25 kg (excepting leatherback sea turtles and some crocodiles). This ...

Dominant hand preference in humans is a trait that scientists are still trying to understand, but new evidence may show that whatever its purpose, the existence of dominant hands might stretch back ...

The history of human evolution isn’t a straight line from fish to monkey to human. You know that. The family tree of the genus Homo is full of diverging paths, with branches and dead ends. But new ...

Has climate change made us who we are today? A broken and fossilized jawbone found poking up amid sediment in an East African hill is rewriting a significant chapter of human evolution — and adding ...

That’s kind of the state of affairs in human evolution, especially now that a new branch of the clan has crawled out of some anthropological backwater and horned its way into the party.