A composite view of the Earth constructed by NASA from multiple satellite images Editor at Large Human evolution is a story writ slow. It’s been about 3.8 billion years since life on Earth emerged and ...

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

A badly crushed cranium unearthed decades ago from a riverbank in central China that once defied classification is now shaking up the human family tree, according to a new analysis. Scientists ...

When our distant ancestors first traded nomadic life for farming, villages, and permanent homes, you might assume that the beastly forces of natural selection lost their ability to shape our species, ...

In 1758, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus gave humans a scientific name: Homo sapiens, which means "wise human" in Latin. Although Linnaeus grouped humans with other apes, it was English biologist ...

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 ...

Scientists analyze 22,000 genomes documenting hundreds of genetic changes due to natural selection over the past 10,000 years ...

“When I began working in human evolution over fifty years ago the East Asian record was either marginalised, or its fossils were only ever considered as direct ancestors of recent East Asians,” ...