For decades, textbooks painted a dramatic picture of early humans as tool-using hunters who rose quickly to the top of the food chain. The tale was that Homo habilis, one of the earliest ...

More than a million years ago, early human relatives crossed an enormous sea to reach the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The discovery pushes back the record of human migration in Southeast Asia and ...

New research along Turkey’s Ayvalık coast reveals a once-submerged land bridge that may have helped early humans cross from Anatolia into Europe. Archaeologists uncovered 138 Paleolithic tools across ...

Long before factories, mines, and cars filled the air with pollution, our distant ancestors were already living with a silent toxin: lead. A groundbreaking study reveals that hominids — from early ...

As early humans spread from lush African forests into grasslands, their need for ready sources of energy led them to develop a taste for grassy plants, especially grains and the starchy plant tissue ...

Our prehistoric human ancestors relied on deliberately modified and sharpened stone tools as early as 3.3 million years ago. The selection of rock type depended on how easily the material could be ...

A rare fossil discovery in Ethiopia has pushed the known range of Paranthropus hundreds of miles farther north than ever before. The 2.6-million-year-old jaw suggests this ancient relative of humans ...

Two small changes in human DNA may have played a big role in helping our ancestors walk upright, researchers say. The study, recently published in the journal Nature, found that these tweaks changed ...

It's easy to take for granted that with the flick of a lighter or the turn of a furnace knob, modern humans can conjure flames — cooking food, lighting candles or warming homes. For much of our ...