(Reuters) - The incorporation of meat into the diet was a milestone for the human evolutionary lineage, a potential catalyst for advances such as increased brain size. But scientists have struggled to ...

Fossils of our earliest ancestors in the "cradle of humankind" are a million years older than previously thought, according to new research. The Sterkfontein Caves in Johannesburg, South Africa, ...

Natural history is a difficult thing to conceptualize. You’ve got eons of undocumented progress, like the evolution of many species. Take, for example, the Australopithecus, an ancient great ape ...

When a partial fossil foot emerged from Ethiopia’s ancient sediments, it carried a quiet but profound implication: Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, may not have walked her ...

The famous 3.2-million-year-old Lucy specimen has captivated scientists since it was discovered in 1974. Lucy was a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, which walked upright and likely ...

Scientists have long been able to measure and analyze the fossil skulls of our ancient ancestors to estimate brain volume and growth. The question of how these ancient brains compare to modern human ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...