A 146,000-year-old skull recovered near Harbin, China, by scientists decades ago has now been found to belong to the Denisovans, an extinct relation to modern humans who lived in Siberia and East Asia ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the ...

Shortly after the first human genome sequence was finalized in 2003, a chimpanzee assembly was released 2. This was followed by assemblies for other great apes, such as the gorilla 3, Sumatran ...

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 ...

In the dry, rugged badlands of Ethiopia’s Afar Region, a team of scientists has uncovered fossils that could change how you picture human evolution. These finds, dating back between 2.6 and 2.8 ...

A fossil cranium, which is around 1 million years old and was initially believed to belong to Homo erectus, is now thought to be part of the Asian longi clade, closely linked to the Denisovans, which ...

The Indigenous peoples of the Bolivian highlands are survivors. For thousands of years they have lived at altitudes of more than two miles, where oxygen is about 35 percent lower than at sea level.

The evolution of human hands is one of the most important – and overlooked – stories of our origin. Now, new fossil evidence ...

Human evolution has long been tied to growing brain size, and new research suggests prenatal hormones may have played a surprising role. By studying the relative lengths of index and ring fingers — a ...