The oldest distinguishing feature between humans and our ape cousins is our ability to walk on two legs—a trait known as bipedalism. Among mammals, only humans and our ancestors perform this atypical ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. – Among the many surprises associated with the discovery of the oldest known, nearly complete skeleton of a hominid is the finding that this species took its first steps toward ...

This release is available in Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese and Amharic. In a special issue of Science, an international team of scientists has for the first time thoroughly described Ardipithecus ...

Lucy, that starlet among ancient human relatives, may have shared the stage with a hominin very different from herself, a newly found fossil suggests. Out of the Ethiopian desert, researchers have ...

More than 1 million years before the early hominin known as Lucy was striding across the Afar region of Ethiopia, the lesser-known Ardipithecus ramidus roamed approximately the same area. Now, a team ...

A new method to estimate sexual dimorphism in fossil species near the base of our family tree has been just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), through the joint ...

African fossils of one of our earliest ancestors, who lived about 4.5 million years ago, could help fill some of the gaps in early human evolution, researchers said Wednesday. The remains of ...

Tim White, Berhane Asfaw, and Gen Suwa, who have long worked together unearthing and analyzing fossils in Africa, made a new and remarkable discovery in 1993. In Ethiopia, they found hominid skull, ...

This tiny bump on an ancient thigh bone has become a big deal for anyone trying to pin down when the human story truly began.

Paleontologists searching the bleak desert of central Ethiopia have unearthed the fossilized bones of a 5.5 million-year-old creature that appears to be the oldest human ancestor yet discovered. The ...

The latest fossil un-earthed from a human ancestral hot spot in Africa allows scientists to link together the most complete chain of human evolution so far. The 4.2 million-year-old fossil discovered ...