Origins

Scientists suggest meat consumption was pivotal to humans' development of larger brains, but the transition probably didn't start with Australopithecus, according to a new study

Welcome to the family.

Two gold-and-iron artifacts from ancient Spain predated our ability to work with iron. So how did they do it? With ready-to-use iron from the sky.

Lucy was a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis, an extinct hominin. Her discovery changed our understanding of evolution.

BALTIMORE — In a groundbreaking discovery that’s turning the world of linguistics and archaeology upside down, researchers from Johns Hopkins University have unearthed what may be the oldest known alphabetic writing in human history — and it’s dramatically older than anyone previously thought. Hidden within a tomb in western Syria, four delicate clay cylinders are challenging everything scholars believed about the origins of alphabetic...

Inside a cave beneath a medieval German castle, researchers have discovered a pit of bones that they say unlock secrets of the earliest humans.

One team of experts believes this could be a major breakthrough. Not everyone is so sure.

How did life emerge on Earth? The age-old question has intrigued experts for years and now a study has hinted that rocky guests who visit us frequently might have carried the seeds of life.  Meteorites likely brought the building blocks of life to the primordial Earth from space, as per new evidence. Scientists are intrigued by the finding as this means that alien life exists somewhere in space.

AL 288-1, commonly known as Lucy or Dinkʼinesh, is a collection of several hundred pieces of fossilized bone comprising 40 percent of the skeleton of a female of the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis. It was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, at Hadar, a site in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle, by Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

The origin of life on Earth is a profound mystery - including when it started and how the ingredients for it were assembled. And a new study aimed at answering the latter question finds that some building blocks didn't need to have formed on Earth, but could have arrived from space. The study, published AprilContinue reading "Evidence grows that meteorites, comets could have brought essentials of life to early Earth" The post Evidence grows that...