Little Foot’s face looks like it has been through a slow-motion car crash, because it has. For millions of years, rock pressure and shifting sediments pushed and twisted the fossil’s facial bones ...

Australopithecus afarensis© "Australopithecus afarensis" by Rod Waddington is licensed under BY-SA 2.0. Natural history is a difficult thing to conceptualize. You’ve got eons of undocumented ...

The finding also applies to Australopithecus africanus, a closely related species from southern Africa. But the two species did not share the same degree of difference. That gap between them, ...

These files consist of 3D scans of historical objects in the collections of the Smithsonian and may be downloaded by you only for non-commercial, educational, and ...

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 ...

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 ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

When this 3-year-old child's skull was found in 1924, it was among the first early human fossils to be found in Africa -- and the first early human fossil discovery to draw major attention to this ...