Smithsonian Magazine on MSN
The top human evolution discoveries of 2025, from the intriguing Neanderthal diet to the oldest Western European face fossil
This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...
Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to ...
In a recent review published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, researchers discussed the role of climatic shifts and vegetation changes in driving the evolution within the subfamily ...
Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...
A digital reconstruction of a million-year-old skull suggests humans may have diverged from our ancient ancestors 400,000 years earlier than thought and in Asia, not Africa, a study found. The ...
Humans were living in rainforests roughly 150,000 years ago, some 80,000 years earlier than was previously thought—and may have been an important center for early human evolution. This is the ...
Four lifelike reconstructions of prehistoric humans have been unveiled — including a model of a species often dubbed "the hobbit," which, as an adult, was about the same height as a modern 4-year-old.
Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...
A new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...
The (un)lucky fossil, now known as Kabwe 1, represents a turning point at a time when Africa was considered peripheral to the story of human evolution. A century later, it’s widely accepted that the ...
John Gowlett receives funding from PAST Africa and Wenner-Gren Foundation, and his work has previously been supported by The Leverhulme Trust. He is associated with a new series of podcasts on human ...
Researchers have dated the mysterious skull from Petralona Cave in Greece to 300,000 years ago and concluded that the fossil belonged to an ancient human group that lived alongside Neanderthals. When ...
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