As The Jungle Book’s King Louie knows all too well, the ability to control fire is what sets humans apart from apes, fueling our cultural and biological evolution and rocketing us into the space age.

New research suggests fire was key to making our bodies successful in evolution – but not in the ways we previously thought.

A study of a handful of 300,000-year-old teeth revealed an ancient human group had a mix of archaic and modern tooth features. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate ...

A 3.4M-year-old set of foot bones from Ethiopia is forcing paleoanthropologists to redraw one of the most familiar diagrams in science, the human family tree. For decades, Lucy, the famous ...

Analysis of ancient proteins may fill in the gaps of human evolution left by the decomposition of DNA. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have ...

Researchers found that ancient hominids—including early humans—were exposed to lead throughout childhood, leaving chemical traces in fossil teeth. Experiments suggest this exposure may have driven ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same place ...

Ever wonder why certain fears feel almost hardwired into us? Like there's something deeper pulling the strings when we spot a spider or stand too close to an edge? Turns out, that's not just your ...