In paleoanthropology, a rare, nearly-complete skeleton can rewrite entire chapters of the human origin story. The “Little Foot,” fossil an exquisitely preserved hominin found in South Africa’s ...

New study of 7-million-year-old fossils from Chad proves Sahelanthropus tchadensis walked upright while still climbing trees.

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 ...

Fossils unearthed in Morocco are the first from a little-understood period of human evolution and may be remains of a ...

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 ...

During a brief but dramatic chapter in Earth's history about 41,000 years ago, the planet’s magnetic field nearly collapsed. What followed was a cascade of environmental and biological changes that ...

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. What’s more, many other cosmic phenomena affect our planet ...

Millions of years ago, a fiery plume rising from Earth’s mantle reshaped continents, closing ancient seas and lifting land that would forever change life on our planet. This upheaval forged a bridge ...

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 ...