A rock sitting quietly in a university lab turned out to contain something far more remarkable than anyone realized: what may ...

A stunning fossil discovery in Ethiopia shows that early Homo and a previously unknown Australopithecus species lived together around 2.6 to 2.8 million years ago. The find overturns the classic ...

Three million years ago, Australopithecus africanus was one of the first human ancestor species to live across the southern African grasslands and forests. A new study of fossil teeth suggests that ...

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 ...

A new study led by paleoanthropologists reveals that Lucy's species Australopithecus afarensis had an ape-like brain. However, the protracted brain growth suggests that -- as is the case in humans -- ...

Australopithecus afarensis© "Australopithecus afarensis" by Rod Waddington is licensed under BY-SA 2.0. Natural history is a difficult thing to conceptualize. You’ve got eons of undocumented ...

A surprising mix of apelike and humanlike features from head to toe supports a controversial contention that a 2-million-year-old member of the human evolutionary family gave rise to the genus Homo, ...

Australopithecus sediba (center) has a unique mix of anatomical traits that has led to debate over its proper place in the hominin family tree. For comparison: a small-bodied female modern human (left ...

From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or ...

The Makapansgat pebble, a jasperite cobble weighing just 260 grams, bears an uncanny resemblance to a human face. What makes this stone truly extraordinary is not just its appearance, but the fact ...