(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 ...

A recent study reveals we have a long-lost relative which hung out with our more famous apelike ancestors about three million years ago. It turns out the human family tree is more complicated than we ...

"I imagine there might be some though who will be skeptical -- as is always the case." Their argument centers on a timeline: The oldest known Homo fossil, a jawbone, is dated at 2.8 million years old, ...

An ancient human relative was able to walk the ground on two legs and use their upper limbs to climb and swing like apes, according to a new study of 2 million-year-old vertebrae fossils. An ...

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 ...

Everything we know about the group of human ancestors called australopiths comes from just a few dozen fossils. But a skull discovered in Ethiopia is now changing anthropologists' understanding of the ...

The high-security fossil vault at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg, contains treasure more precious than the gold that paid for the university’s establishment. It is the ...

Three million years ago, Australopithecus africanus was one of the first human ancestor species to live across the southern African grasslands and forests. A new study of fossil teeth suggests that ...

Childbirth was difficult and dangerous for our ape-like ancestors, much as it is for women today. A new study of the pelvises of Australopithecus suggests that labour exerted powerful forces on their ...

This research was supported by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the Claude Leon Foundation, the DST-NRF Center of Excellence in Palaeosciences, ...