"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, ...

Composite reconstruction of Australopithecus sediba, based on remains from three individuals found at the site of Malapa in South Africa. Image: Courtesy of Lee R. Berger and the University of the ...

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 ...

When studying how fossil hominids moved, researchers usually analyze the morphology of bones—which is crucial for understanding the evolution of bipedalism—focusing mainly on muscle insertion sites.

A team of scientists, including Texas A&M researchers, believe 2-million-year-old skeletal remains may be a new type of species that played a role in human evolution. A series of six papers in the ...

Spinal bones of an extinct human relative have been found in lumps of rock blasted out of a South African cave and used to reconstruct one of the most complete back fossils of any hominin. The spine ...

Sometime around 2 million years ago, a group of bipedal hominins in Eastern Africa gradually evolved into something that looked and acted enough like us to be part of our genus, Homo. This was an ...

The 2-million-year-old fossils belong to the species Australopithecus sediba (Au. sediba) and provides "unprecedented insight into the anatomy and phylogenetic position of an early human ancestor," ...

Everybody knows "Lucy." For nearly four decades, this famous partial skeleton of Australopithecus afarensis, dated to 3.2 million years ago, has been an ambassador for our prehistoric past, and her ...

A diagram of how the skeletons of Australopithecus sediba came to be preserved in the Malapa cave deposit. From Dirks et al, 2010. A little less than two million years ago, in what is now South Africa ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Now, I can already hear the protests of more ...