Three years ago researchers added a new branch to the human family tree: Australopithecus sediba, a nearly two-million-year-old relative from South Africa. By all accounts it was a dazzling find—two partial skeletons, an adult female and young male, from a site called Malapa just outside Johannesburg. And it has been making headlines regularly since then [...]

HONOLULU–A seven-million-year-old skull found in the Djurab Desert in Chad may indeed represent the earliest known member of the human family. Researchers unveiled the specimen back in 2002 and made quite a splash with their claim that the ancient fossil was our ancestor. They assigned it to a new species, Sahelanthropus tchadensis (nickname: Toumaï) and [...]

A new study suggests that we might be thinking about tree climbing in our recent ancestors all wrong. The traditional idea that our ancestors descended from the trees and gradually—and exclusively—began walking upright might be a gross over simplification. Fossil evidence from early hominins suggests that adaptations for tree climbing, such as long arms and [...]

Recent years have brought considerable riches for those of us interested in human evolution and 2012 proved no exception. New fossils, archaeological finds and genetic analyses yielded thrilling insights into the shape of the family tree, the diets of our ancient predecessors, the origins of art and advanced weaponry, the interactions between early Homo sapiens [...]

There has been fierce debate recently over whether the original “caveman” diet was one of heaps of bloody meat or fields of greens. New findings suggest that some of our early ancestors were actually quite omnivorous. But subsequently, our line and an ill-fated group of hominins developed very different dietary strategies. One chose meat while [...]

Readers of this blog may have noticed that I’m obsessed with a recently discovered member of the human family tree: the nearly two million-year-old Australopithecus sediba, discovered at a site called Malapa near Johannesburg.  There are several reasons for this fixation. For one thing it’s new—it isn’t every day that a previously unknown human relative [...]

Last fall, on a reporting trip to Johannesburg for a story on the discovery of fossils representing a previously unknown member of human family called Australopithecus sediba, the researchers I met with were buzzing with excitement about, of all things, tartar. That’s right, the crusty deposits that the dentist scrapes off your teeth when you [...]

Genetic findings often underscore the notion that organisms with similar-looking body parts aren’t always close evolutionary relatives. Wings for flying or sharp teeth for ripping into food can be the result of convergent evolution, in which natural selection results in similar-looking solutions to problems faced by different species—whether they are distantly or closely related. Teasing [...]

At some point in the past five million years or so, our human ancestors traded in an arboreal existence for a dedicated two-legged life on the ground. A patchy fossil record, however, has frustrated researchers hoping to pinpoint the emergence of more modern human upright walking.  Even the gait of the well-studied "Lucy" species, Australopithecus [...]