Early Humans

On September 2, 2018, a fire ripped through Brazil’s 200-year-old National Museum, destroying as much as 90 percent of its items, statues and extraordinary treasures. Among those artifacts whose fate remained unknown was an utterly irreplaceable 11,500-year-old skull known as ...read more

They have long been maligned with the image of knuckle-dragging, thick-skulled brutes—but more recent evidence tells another story. In recent years, studies have shown that Neanderthals produced art, mourned their dead and even used toothpicks to clean between their teeth, just ...read more

For 200,000 years, Neanderthals thrived throughout Eurasia. They seem to have lived full and happy lives. Like us, theyproduced art, mourned their dead, and even used toothpicks to clean between their teeth. But 45,000 years ago, as Homo sapiens made a home in Europe for the ...read more

Northern Peru is known for its pre-Columbian ruins and its sunny beaches. A recent archaeological discovery combines both—in the most grisly way imaginable. At a dig in a shantytown near Trujillo, Peru, archaeologists have located the bodies of hundreds of children and llamas, ...read more

We lived alongside mammoths, had not yet discovered bronze or writing and spent our lives moving constantly from place to place. But even 10,000 years ago, human beings loved their pet dogs. This fact is borne out in an ancient gravesite in Illinois, where a trio of dogs were ...read more

Archaeologists have discovered the oldest known human footprints in North America. Specifically, they’ve discovered footprints from three ice-age humans who walked the shores of a Canadian Island approximately 13,000 years ago. Researchers believe that the 29 clay footprints, ...read more

It’s been known for some time that our modern human ancestors interbred with other early hominin groups like the Neanderthals. But it turns out they were even more promiscuous than we thought. New DNA research has unexpectedly revealed that modern humans (Homo sapiens) mixed, ...read more

The 10,000-year-old skeleton of “Cheddar Man,” the oldest complete skeleton found in Britain, recently became a bit less mysterious. It was just revealed through DNA analysis that the man recognized as the first modern Brit had a “dark to black” skin tone. “Cheddar Man” was ...read more

An international team of scientists has discovered a Homo sapiens fossil in Israel that is somewhere between 175,000 and 200,000 years old, making it the oldest modern human fossil ever found outside Africa. The discovery of the upper jawbone fossil in Misliya Cave on Mount ...read more

The Stone Age marks a period of prehistory in which humans used primitive stone tools. Lasting roughly 2.5 million years, the Stone Age ended around 5,000 years ago when humans in the Near East began working with metal and making tools and weapons from bronze. During the Stone ...read more

The Neolithic Revolution, also called the Agricultural Revolution, marked the transition in human history from small, nomadic bands of hunter-gatherers to larger, agricultural settlements and early civilization. The Neolithic Revolution started around 10,000 B.C. in the Fertile ...read more

Hunter-gatherers were prehistoric nomadic groups that harnessed the use of fire, developed intricate knowledge of plant life and refined technology for hunting and domestic purposes as they spread from Africa to Asia, Europe and beyond. From African hominins of 2 million years ...read more

DNA analysis of a six-week-old baby girl, buried some 11,500 years ago in what is now Alaska, has identified her as a member of a previously unknown Native American population. The discovery strongly supports the theory that the Americas were settled by people from Siberia, and ...read more

New research published in Nature this week is upending the traditional notion that the earliest modern Homo sapiens (humans) emerged gradually in East Africa around 200,000 years ago, and then dispersed to other areas of the African continent and beyond. Based on more than a ...read more

According to the generally accepted story of human evolution, the human lineage split from that of apes some 7 million years ago in Africa. Hominins (early humans) are believed to have stayed put in Africa until about 2 million years ago, when they migrated first to Asia and then ...read more

In 2003, researchers uncovered nine partial skeletons from nine different ancient individuals in the Liang Bua cave, located on the Indonesian island of Flores. The remains belonged to an early hominid species that—like humans—walked upright and used tools. Unlike Homo sapiens, ...read more

The newly published paper is the first extensive DNA study of Aboriginal Australians, according to the University of Cambridge. Working in close collaboration with indigenous Australian elders and leaders, an international team of researchers obtained permission to extract DNA ...read more

The discovery of Lucy’s partial skeleton represented a major breakthrough in the study of ancient human ancestors, enabling scientists to establish that early hominids like Australopithecus afarensis learned to walk upright before their brains grew larger. Though Lucy’s feet, ...read more