Palaeoanthropology

A new study by archaeologists at the University of York challenges evolutionary theories behind the development of our earliest ancestors from tree dwelling quadrupeds to upright bipeds capable of walking and scrambling.

Most modern human mothers wean their babies much earlier than our closest primate relatives. But what about our extinct relatives, the Neanderthals?

Recently published paper indicates discovery could yield important clues on origins of humankind

Species identified in 2010 is 1 of closest relatives to humans A dental study of fossilized remains found in South Africa in 2008 provides new support that this species is one of the closest relatives to early humans.

Researchers at Wits University in South Africa, including Peter Schmid from the University of Zurich, have described the anatomy of a single early hominin in six new studies.

A team of scientists has pieced together how the hominid Australopithecus sediba (Au. sediba) walked, chewed, and moved nearly two million years ago.

Buried for 100,000 years at Xujiayao in the Nihewan Basin of northern China, the recovered skull pieces of an early human exhibit a now-rare congenital deformation that indicates inbreeding might well have been common among our ancestors, new research from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Washington University in St. Louis suggests.

Although a relatively large number of late Middle Pleistocene hominins have been found in East Asia, these fossils have not been consistently included in current debates about the origin of anatomically modern humans (AMHS), and little is known about their phylogenetic place in relation to contemporary hominins from Africa and Europe as well as to Upper Pleistocene hominins.

When, how and why modern humans first stood up and walked on two legs is considered to be one of the greatest missing links in our evolutionary history. Scientists have gone to the far ends of the earth – and the wonderful creatures in it - to look for answers to why we walk the way we walk.

Neanderthal brains were adapted to allow them to see better and maintain larger bodies, according to new research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B today.

A newly discovered Y chromosome places the most recent common ancestor for the Y chromosome lineage more 100,000 years before the oldest known anatomically modern human fossils

Cueva de Nerja : Wiki Commons Researchers of the University of Valencia have dated between 14.500 and 13.500 years ago the remains of balanus, a...

Image : John Stewart conducting his research into prehistoric environments Tracing the effects of climate change on prehistoric and future environments Dr John Stewart has made...

For decades, archaeologists have debated how farming spread to Stone Age Europe, setting the stage for the rise of Western civilization.

Most palaeoanthropologists consider the robust australopithecines to be an offshoot of the gracile australopithecines and most are in agreement that the former deserve a separate genus – Paranthropus. This is currently up for debate because we now realise that there could be more to hominin evolution on the African continent than the fossil record is leading us to believe.