A 1.6-million-year-old Ethiopian skull blends ancestor and descendant features, rewriting the origin story of Homo erectus.

Modern humans, Neanderthals, and other recent relatives on our human family tree evolved bigger brains much more rapidly than earlier species, a new study of human brain evolution has found. The study ...

Brain size increased gradually within each ancient human species rather than through sudden leaps between species. Modern humans, Neanderthals, and other recent relatives on our human family tree ...

A new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...

Encephalization — the increase in brain size relative to the body — is a key feature in human evolution, but exactly how this process occurred is still unclear. Looking at studies comparing the ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have ...

An international study changes the view that exposure to the toxic metal lead is largely a post-industrial phenomenon. The research reveals that our human ancestors were periodically exposed to lead ...

In his new BBC show, Jim Al-Khalili journeys through hundreds of millions of years of brain evolution. Live Science spoke to him about what he learned along the way and how this knowledge sheds new ...

Humans, who are classified among the five great apes, are closest genetically, i.e., DNA similarity, to chimpanzees (98.8%-99%) and bonobos (98.8%). [Blueringmedia ...