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 ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

Nijmegen, 10 December 2025 - More than a decade after the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, scientists are still working to understand how human-specific DNA changes shaped our evolution. A new ...

Recent research has unveiled an unexpected link between the ancient human exposure to lead and the evolutionary development of our brains. This groundbreaking study, conducted by scientists at Arizona ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Ten fossil teeth belong to new Australopithecus species Found in Afar Region, they are 2.65 million years old This species coexisted with an early Homo species Fossils underscore complex nature of ...

Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection.

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 ...

Shaw Badenhorst works for the University of the Witwatersrand. He receives funding from GENUS, the National Research Foundation and the Palaeontological Scientific Trust. South Africa has one of the ...