Studying human evolution involves piecing together scattered clues about how we survived against tough odds. One of the biggest mysteries is understanding how large or small ancient human populations ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

At the root of our family tree is a 600-million-year-old cyclops. Biologists from Lund University in Sweden recently ...

Flight is a rare skill in the animal world. Among vertebrates, it evolved only three times: in bats, birds, and the long-extinct pterosaurs. Pterosaurs were the pioneers, taking to the skies more than ...

In 2001, researchers unearthed a scattering of fossils beneath the windswept dunes of the Djurab Desert of northern Chad. The remains were later identified as belonging to an extinct species, ...

On Valentine’s Day in 2018, a team of scientists walked across a flat expanse in the badlands of northeastern Ethiopia, scanning the ground for fossils. An eagle-eyed field assistant, Omar Abdulla, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie and field assistant Ali Kadir look at a hominin fossil specimen found in the Afar Rift ...

When we think of lead poisoning, most of us imagine modern human-made pollution, paint, old pipes, or exhaust fumes. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest sci-tech news updates. But our new study ...

Looks can be deceiving -- Many trees in the forest : the DNA quest to find our closest ape relative -- The great divorce : how and when did humans and chimpanzees part ways? -- A population crash in ...

The evolutionary case for eating meat is etched into human anatomy — but so is the case against it. The science deserves more ...

Nearly 100 million years ago, snakes weren’t the sleek, limbless creatures we know today—they still had hind legs and even a ...

In 1758, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus gave humans a scientific name: Homo sapiens, which means "wise human" in Latin. Although Linnaeus grouped humans with other apes, it was English biologist ...