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 ...

A digital reconstruction of a million-year-old skull suggests humans may have diverged from our ancient ancestors 400,000 years earlier than thought and in Asia, not Africa, a study found. The ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

Human evolution is often told as a tidy story of adaptation, yet some of our most familiar body parts still defy straightforward explanation. From the jut of the human chin to the curve of the outer ...

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 new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...

In 1990, an ancient human skull was unearthed in China’s Hubei Province that was so badly deformed during fossilization that it was hard to gauge its significance. A new analysis now indicates that ...

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 ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

He lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, eking out an existence in what is today central China. Sporting a squat neck and a big brain, he likely wielded tools made of stone and hunted or scavenged ...