During the Miocene, Europe was home to a mysterious group of great apes known as Dryopithecini. Fossils discovered in France, Spain, and Austria reveal an extinct ape with features that blur the line ...

In November 1924 a blast was fired in a limestone quarry near Taungs in Bechuanaland, South Africa. In the material that tumbled to the foot of the cliff were fossil fragments from a cave which the ...

A digital reconstruction of a one-million-year old skull in China called Yunxian 2 suggested that our species started to emerge half a million years earlier than previously believed, according to a ...

IN another column of this issue of NATURE (p. 486) there appears a communication from Dr. R. Broom, of the Transvaal Museum, Pretoria, in which he records the circumstances of discovery in July last ...

Everyone’s seen Rudolph Zallinger’s “The March of Progress” illustration showcasing the evolution of humans: from early primate ape ancestor, Dryopithecus, and progressing toward modern man, Homo ...

Projections of our future under climate change paint a picture of extreme weather and acidified oceans, a world many of today’s animals — including humans — may struggle, or fail, to survive. Yet ...

Modern man, the only living species of a once numerous human family, is as definitely pigeonholed in the animal world by taxonomists (biological classifiers) as is Sylvilagus floridanus, the ...

Evolution is often depicted as a steady march toward increasingly better beings, but this common narrative overlooks the litany of evolutionary quirks throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. A new ...

The origin and early evolution of the great ape/human clade (Hominidae) is currently a subject of debate. The controversy is fuelled by the fragmentary nature of the fossils which renders it difficult ...