The oldest distinguishing feature between humans and our ape cousins is our ability to walk on two legs—a trait known as bipedalism. Among mammals, only humans and our ancestors perform this atypical ...

The latest fossil un-earthed from a human ancestral hot spot in Africa allows scientists to link together the most complete chain of human evolution so far. The 4.2 million-year-old fossil discovered ...

Our distant ancestors may have swung from branches and knuckle-walked like a chimpanzee – challenging recent thinking that the earliest hominins did neither. That is the conclusion of an analysis of 4 ...

This release is available in Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese and Amharic. In a special issue of Science, an international team of scientists has for the first time thoroughly described Ardipithecus ...

African fossils of one of our earliest ancestors, who lived about 4.5 million years ago, could help fill some of the gaps in early human evolution, researchers said Wednesday. Subscribe to read this ...

More than 1 million years before the early hominin known as Lucy was striding across the Afar region of Ethiopia, the lesser-known Ardipithecus ramidus roamed approximately the same area. Now, a team ...

LOS ALAMOS, New Mexico, October 1, 2009—A Los Alamos National Laboratory geologist is part of an international research team responsible for discovering the oldest nearly intact skeleton of ...

Sileshi Semaw from the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH), is coauthor of a paper published in the Journal of Human Evolution about a large series of fossil ...

The skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, an ancient fossil dubbed "Ardi," is radically changing our ideas about mankind's origins. Kent State University's C. Owen Lovejoy says Ardi shows our ancestors ...