About 3.8 million years ago, a distant human relative took his final steps. Swept into a river delta, his head was buried in sand that, over time, hardened into a stone helmet. The skull fossilized ...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists on Wednesday announced the landmark discovery in Ethiopia of a nearly complete skull of an early human ancestor that lived 3.8 million years ago, a species boasting ...

The ancient skeleton known as “Little Foot” has long been a celebrity in paleoanthropology, but a new wave of research is pushing it into even more provocative territory. Instead of fitting neatly ...

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 ...

A very small human ancestor made a very big splash back in 2004, when researchers discovered the remains of Homo floresiensis, a 3-ft., prehuman “hobbit,” in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores.

This skull is the first to “give us a glimpse of what the face of Australopithecus anamensis looks like,” Haile-Selassie said. It had a jutting jaw and lower features. Over millions of years, hominin ...

The skull, probably a male’s, is from a species called Australopithecus anamensis, as Haile-Selassie and his colleagues report in a pair of papers published Wednesday in the journal Nature. When ...