When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A series of lower jaws from North Africa demonstrates variation among hominin fossils. The jaw on ...

Archaeologists have found the oldest-known surviving examples of handheld wooden tools.

Many people today simply assume that our evolution has quietly ended with the development of the modern human. It's easy to think that medicine, science, and modern living have made us "perfect" or ...

Geneticists have uncovered a faint but persistent signal in modern DNA that points to a vanished branch of humanity, a “ghost” lineage that left no confirmed skeletons or skulls behind. Instead of ...

Lead exposure has been thought to be a uniquely modern phenomenon. Exposure to lead by ancient humans could have given modern humans a survival advantage over other species – more specifically, their ...

Denisovans, a mysterious human relative, left behind far more than a handful of fossils—they left genetic fingerprints in modern humans across the globe. Multiple interbreeding events with distinct ...

Researchers studied ancient tooth fossils and found that a gene mutation in modern humans (right) better protected them against lead and gave them an advantage over Neanderthals (left). Kyle Dykes / ...

Outlining the problem / P. A. Mellars, M. J. Aitken and C. B. Stringer -- Uranium-series dating and the origin of modern man / Henry P. Schwarcz -- Luminescence dating relevant to human origins / M. J ...