(Reuters) - The incorporation of meat into the diet was a milestone for the human evolutionary lineage, a potential catalyst for advances such as increased brain size. But scientists have struggled to ...

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 ...

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 ...

Everything we know about the group of human ancestors called australopiths comes from just a few dozen fossils. But a skull discovered in Ethiopia is now changing anthropologists' understanding of the ...

Early human relatives experienced risky childbirth due to pelvic shape, revealing deep evolutionary roots of birth difficulty.

Of all the early human ancestor fossils ever found, “Lucy” may be the most famous among examples of Australopithecus, a group of ancient hominins that lived in what is now Africa more than two million ...

The high-security fossil vault at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg, contains treasure more precious than the gold that paid for the university’s establishment. It is the ...

The recovery of new lumbar vertebrae from the lower back of a single individual of the human relative, Australopithecus sediba, and portions of other vertebrae of the same female from Malapa, South ...

When studying how fossil hominids moved, researchers usually analyze the morphology of bones—which is crucial for understanding the evolution of bipedalism—focusing mainly on muscle insertion sites.