Once they had thought the development of a large brain or the making and use of stone tools was the pivotal early evolutionary innovation setting human ancestors, the hominids, apart from the apes.

She is not the oldest member of the extended human family, but she is by far the most complete of the early hominids; most of her skull and teeth as well as extremely rare bones of her pelvis ...

As the African landscape shifted gradually from dense forests toward large patches of savannah, early hominids found their food supplies waning, leading them to descend from the trees and become ...

leading paleoanthropologists to infer that these fossils represent early members of the hominin lineage. The first human-like traits to appear in the hominin fossil record are bipedal walking and ...

A stunning discovery in China is shaking up what we thought we knew about human evolution. Scientists have uncovered a hominid skull, nicknamed “Dragon Head,” near Hualongdong that doesn’t fit ...

For those early hominids, a fire at night served as a light source and a way to deter predators. John Gowlett, a University of Liverpool ar­chaeologist, argues that this innovation led to a ...