Newly discovered fossils in Ethiopia show that Homo coexisted with Australopithecus 2.6 million years ago, rewriting the timeline of human evolution. Far from a straight line, early human history was ...

New dating methods at the Sterkfontein caves in South Africa reveal Australopithecus fossils are between 3.4 and 3.7 million years old, not 2 million as once believed. This discovery pushes back their ...

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. What’s more, many other cosmic phenomena affect our planet ...

Francis Thackeray has received funding from the National Research Foundation. Global cooling that happened millions of years ago was thought to be the result of ocean currents. He suggests instead it ...

Evolution is the process of heritable change in populations of organisms over multiple generations. Evolutionary biology is the study of this process, which can occur through mechanisms including ...

Nathan (Nate) Rott is a correspondent on NPR's Science Desk, where he reports on the natural world and humanity's relationship to it. Since coming to NPR in 2013, Rott has worked on the network's ...

Green, D., Gordon, A., and Richmond, Brian G. 2007. "Limb-size proportions in Australopithecus afarensis and Australopithecus africanus." Journal of Human Evolution ...

In general, small-bodied, early H. erectus fossils had brain sizes not much bigger than that of Australopithecus (an ancestor of the Homo genus that includes Lucy), according to Van Arsdale, but the ...