The oldest distinguishing feature between humans and our ape cousins is our ability to walk on two legs—a trait known as bipedalism. Among mammals, only humans and our ancestors perform this atypical ...

This release is available in Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese and Amharic. In a special issue of Science, an international team of scientists has for the first time thoroughly described Ardipithecus ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. – Among the many surprises associated with the discovery of the oldest known, nearly complete skeleton of a hominid is the finding that this species took its first steps toward ...

A new method to estimate sexual dimorphism in fossil species near the base of our family tree has been just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), through the joint ...

African fossils of one of our earliest ancestors, who lived about 4.5 million years ago, could help fill some of the gaps in early human evolution, researchers said Wednesday. The remains of ...

Lucy, that starlet among ancient human relatives, may have shared the stage with a hominin very different from herself, a newly found fossil suggests. Out of the Ethiopian desert, researchers have ...

A fossilized foot found in the dusty sediments of northern Ethiopia has reopened one of paleoanthropology’s most consequential questions: how many species of early hominins walked the Earth at the ...

Tim White, Berhane Asfaw, and Gen Suwa, who have long worked together unearthing and analyzing fossils in Africa, made a new and remarkable discovery in 1993. In Ethiopia, they found hominid skull, ...

Paleontologists searching the bleak desert of central Ethiopia have unearthed the fossilized bones of a 5.5 million-year-old creature that appears to be the oldest human ancestor yet discovered. The ...