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Scientists identify 'sweet spot' for early stage of life on Earth that preceded LUCA, the ancestor of all living things
New research has pinned down the onset of the "RNA World," a hypothetical time in Earth's very early history when RNA was the primary replicating substance.
Genealogy project reveals a dark side of Iowa history
What would you do if genealogy research revealed an ancestor was a crime boss? Iowa natives David and Rose Donovan turned their family discovery into a book exposing Des Moines' forgotten dark side: “The Nastiest Saloon in Iowa.”
Alaska's 1964 earthquake lifted parts of the seafloor high enough to create new freshwater ponds, and marine sticklebacks moved into them; within 50 years the fish had evolved almost as far from their ocean ancestors as freshwater populations thousands of years older
When an earthquake lifted the seafloor in Alaska, it accidentally created a evolutionary laboratory where fish rewrote millions of years of adaptation in just five decades.
Scientists have traced the human eye back to a tiny one-eyed ancestor that lived nearly 600 million years ago — and remnants of that ancient “cyclops” eye may still survive inside our brains as the pineal gland
What if the mysterious gland Descartes thought held the soul is actually a shriveled relic from our one-eyed ancestor—and some animals still use theirs.
Jenks Center presents ‘Stone Age Science’ with Joshua Passell
The following was submitted by the Jenks Center: On Tuesday, Sept. 15, the Jenks Center, 109 Skillings Road, will host “Stone Age Science,” from 6-7 p.m., with Joshua Passell. The natural world is rich with mysteries, but not so mysterious that our ancient ancestors were unable to understand
Scientists Found 6,000-Year-Old Human Remains. No Other People Share Their DNA.
If they have no ancestors or descendants, then who are they?
Researchers identify traces of two ‘ghost’ ancestors in modern human DNA
Scientists uncovered DNA from two mysterious human ancestors hidden in modern genomes, revealing new clues about our evolutionary past.
Mammal ancestors may have given live birth 90 million years earlier than we thought, rewriting evolutionary timelines
A distinctive growth ring in fossilized bones is revealing how an ancestral species in the mammalian family reproduced.
These mammal ancestors birthed live young far earlier than thought
Growth rings on a fossil bone suggest at least one mammal ancestor gave birth to live young rather than laying eggs 236 million years ago.
For Eons, Human Evolution Barely Budged—Then It Exploded. Now Scientists Know Why.
A hidden force let humans smash a barrier that had trapped our ancestors for millions of years.
Scientists discover 2 new 'ghost' lineages that contributed DNA to modern humans
A new method of analyzing modern humans' DNA is revealing secrets about our extinct ancestors.
Everyone alive may carry DNA from a ‘ghost lineage’ of human ancestors
Scientists analyzing modern genomes may have found a long-lost branch of the human family tree
After Hobbes vs Rousseau: Politics must move beyond human nature
Since the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, our political theory has been organised around a single question: is human nature essentially good or essentially corrupt? Graham Harman, the philosopher behind object-oriented ontology, argues that this is simply the wrong question to be asking. The real forces governing our collective fate - climate change, artificial intelligence, geography, and pandemics - are non-human; therefore, questions about human nature are not the central ones. Instead, Harman proposes a politics reorganised around our relationship to non-human objects and environments, in which quasi-government institutions incentivise and deter actions with the aim of extending the survival of the human race. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This has become one of the most popular phrases among twenty-first-century intellectuals. Often misattributed to Fredric Jameson, it has been warmly embraced by such influential authors as Slavoj Žižek and the tragically departed Mark Fisher, and has fueled the notion that the major problem with the political Left is that it simply needs to become more speculative and creative. Naturally, this is never a bad idea in any human pursuit. But what if the political distinction between Left, Right, and Center itself results from a failure of imagination? SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass This particular division has been with us only since the summer of 1789. During the simmering prelude to the French Revolution, it referred originally to the physical position in the National Assembly of radical figures on one side and loyal monarchists on the other. These positions are linked with two entirely different camps of modern political theory. On the Left we find a series of authors ranging from the moderate (Locke) to the supercharged (Rousseau) to the truly radical (Marx), all of them contending that exploitation of the many by the few justifies revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. On the Right they are countered by the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt, a group of thinkers convinced that corrupt human nature can be tamed only by force. In the words of the Nazi supporter Schmitt: “One could test all theories of nature and state and political ideas according to their anthropology and classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose [humans] to be by nature evil or by nature good.” This is the division we continue to face today, even in the daily retail politics of Western democracies.___Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims.___The most refreshing feature of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was their awareness that the forced choice between Rousseau and Hobbes (as they put it) is no longer sufficient. Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims. Far from being stationed “beyond good and evil,” we seem to be fully entangled with both. We are not naturally good or evil, Graeber and Wengrow contend, but naturally experimental and imaginative. They rest their case on the archaeological record, which seems to bear witness to numerous episodes of seasonally shifting governments and festivals, which vacillate in the same society (even in the same year) between the egalitarian and the dictatorial. Such praise of political experiment makes a good fit with the generally anarchist position defended by these authors. Yet it is also what I find most disappointing in their position. Although they are right that the forced choice between Hobbes and Rousseau falls short of what our new situation requires, the authors simply replace it with praise for the human being as a political tinkerer and performer. In other words, they give us just another theory of human nature, one that would not have been out of place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What other options might we have?___The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature… We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them___One fresh approach would be to treat politics within a broader framework than human nature, given that the polis does not exist in a vacuum filled exclusively with people. When Bruno Latour went to observe the baboons of Kenya with the San Diego anthropologist Shirley Strum, they jointly concluded that these primates were more socially interdependent than our own species. Each baboon is so reliant on the dynamics of the group that they find themselves locked into constant surveillance of their potentially dangerous peers. The group structure turns out to be inherently volatile. Humans, by contrast, are able to stabilize their societies to a large degree through the mediation of inanimate objects. Although one’s position in society may seem to fluctuate over time, considerable stability is produced through such items as apartment keys, wedding rings, and identification cards, all of them serving to secure us a place distinct from that of our fellows. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has written at length about the crucial role of documents in establishing social relations, making him a hero among notaries in his country. Proper names and license plates cement our position amidst other humans, as do symbolic achievements such as graduation from a top university or distinguished wartime service with its various medals and ribbons. None of this is found among baboons, despite their closeness to us on the evolutionary tree: after all, we did share a common ancestor just 25 to 30 million years ago. SUGGESTED VIEWING The goodness paradox With Richard Wrangham The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature, whether understood in the manner of the Left or of the Right. We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them. But initially, it is true, we face non-human things primarily in the form of constraints. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to form a human civilization underwater, deep underground, atop Mount Everest, or in outer space. Human dependence on the non-social background takes on subtler form in discussions of political geography, especially unloved on the more idealistic Left. Consider the luckless position of Poland during World War II, sandwiched between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. By contrast, note the good fortune of the United States in not having a military peer positioned on any land border. Anglo-American geopolitics, since the writings of the American naval commander Alfred Thayer Mahan and the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, has been wedded to the notion that one or more liberal offshore naval powers should prevent any authoritarian “heartland” regime from gaining effective control of Eurasia. That remains the case whether the opponent is the impatient Napoleon, the swashbuckling German Kaiser, the villainous Hitler, the murderous Stalin, or the industrial juggernaut Chinese. In their current Foreign Affairs article “Heartland vs. Rimland,” Michael Beckley and Hal Brands analyze the current and coming state of the world on the basis of these same rather durable principles. In recent years a similar outlook has been embraced, in inverted form, by the Putin-loving Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an icon of the Rightist intellectual underworld. For Dugin, the Anglo-Saxons are an evil force bent on destroying the spiritually superior people of the land: much like Athens in its failed war with Sparta, or Carthage in its eventual collapse against Rome. But the shared notion on both sides is that any strategy that fails to take geography into account is likely to end up as a defeated form of excessive optimism.___When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole.___More striking for us today than geography is the non-human object called climate, which threatens rimland and heartland equally. Even if we contend that humans are one hundred percent responsible for triggering the climate crisis, it remains non-human in the sense of being an independent force beyond our effective control. In a major work published just before his death in 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted the tendency of evolutionary theorists to focus too closely on the fate of individuals in view of their successful or failed adaptation to circumstances. With climate change, however, we confront a force that goes well beyond the scope of any individual life. Whereas Richard Dawkins extended evolutionary questions downward from individuals to the sub-individual gene, Gould pushed it upward, speaking of entire species or clades as impacted by environmental change. The asteroid that struck the Yucatán 66 million years ago is only the most famous example of this sort. In the wake of that catastrophe, large animals needing abundant supplies of food were at a fatal disadvantage by contrast with the smaller birds and mammals of the planet. When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole. The effect is to shift our attention away from individual beings towards the survival of the group.In the United States in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked considerable backlash among those who asserted a nearly absolute degree of individual freedom. In California I encountered those who demanded that their businesses be allowed to reopen, that it was enough to cover their mouths but not their noses, or that they should have the right to enter any public area despite refusing vaccination. Yet public health is probably the clearest argument against libertarianism, which often merely asserts the autonomy of individuals against any claims of the commons. In normal times the individual is worth defending; under conditions that threaten the survival of part or all of our species, compulsion may be our only resort, as with perfectly reasonable blackouts and rations in wartime. To rebuild human society under the constraints of climate change will be one of the great challenges of the century to come, as will our improvised grappling with artificial intelligence. Such phenomena pose existential risks for humanity, and leave far less room for tolerance of individual brattiness. Cases are mounting of devastating wildfires caused by arson. Recently it was reported that there is even a website where one can bet on the location of coming wildfires, raising the specter of deliberate blazes set to collect on wagers. The death penalty has steadily lost support in a world where many stress the infinite value of human life. But if we focus instead on entire ecosystems, those who purposely burn the forests may begin to look worse than serial murderers.___The politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere.___So far I have spoken of force, authority, and punishment: measures sure to have greater appeal to those who identify with what we know as the Right. But other implications of the post-anthropocentric world are likely to have different backers. If non-human objects are seen as structuring political space, it stands to reason that they can no longer be introduced solely by the pace of technical breakthrough. Fields ranging from cybernetics to energy will demand increased politicization once they are reconceived not just as products of individual human investment, but as renovations of collective political geography. This need not involve world government, with its inherent risk of tyranny, but may involve quasi-governmental enforcers of prestige along the lines of a less corrupt FIFA or International Olympic Committee, punishing deviant states not with violence but with less tangible incentives.Politics will never lose its historic links with conflict and faction. But rather than factions aligned by differing theories of human nature, the politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere. This will prove just as incommensurable with the modern Left/Right spectrum as a globe is with a two-dimensional map.
Monkeys have a basic intuition for geometry, study suggests
Baboons and macaques appear to use some of the same mental strategies as humans when matching shapes, suggesting that the foundations of geometry evolved in a common ancestor.
Scientists trace the shocking origin of human eyes to an ancient “cyclops”
Researchers say a tiny one-eyed ancestor that lived nearly 600 million years ago may have shaped the evolution of every vertebrate eye, including our own. They also found that its ancient median eye lives on today as the pineal gland, which helps synchronize our sleep with daylight.
Science Journal: Humans’ Big Brains Evolved “For No Particular Reason”?
We’ve heard countless times that bigger brains evolved to allow for higher intelligence in our hominid ancestors – but not any more.
Fossil teeth smaller than a nail may rewrite human origin stories - Futura-Sciences
A shrew sized primate ancestor Purgatorius first appears in the fossil record around 65.9 million years ago. This timeline places the animal just after the Cretaceous-Paleogene asteroid impact that eliminated non-avian dinosaurs. The creature was a small, tree-dwelling mammal about the size of a modern shrew. Scientists classify it as...
Scientists have built a cell in a lab from the ground up
What do you call an organism with no evolutionary ancestors? SpudCell, apparently
Scientists have built a cell from the ground up
What do you call an organism with no evolutionary ancestors? SpudCell, apparently
Turtles Are Really Weird Animals. Where Did They Come From?
The origin of turtles has puzzled scientists. A new study provides more evidence that these shelled reptiles share a common ancestor with crocodiles and birds.
Scientists discover how a single cell builds a brain with 170 billion cells
How does a single cell build a brain with billions of precisely organized neurons? Researchers suggest that brain cells use their lineage—their cellular family tree—as a kind of positional map. Cells that come from the same ancestor stay near one another, helping the brain organize itself without relying solely on chemical signals.
Early humans were bringing fire into caves 1.8 million years ago
A new study suggests early humans were using fire in South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave as far back as 1.79 million years ago. Researchers found burned bones deep inside the cave, where natural wildfires could not have reached, indicating that fire was likely carried in and maintained by human ancestors. The discovery pushes back the timeline for fire use and reveals surprisingly sophisticated behavior long before humans could create fire on demand.
Scientists open a million-year-old time capsule hidden beneath New Zealand
A cave in New Zealand has yielded fossils from a lost ecosystem that existed about 1 million years ago, including a possible flying ancestor of the kākāpō. The discovery reveals that volcanoes and climate upheaval were reshaping the country’s wildlife and driving extinctions long before humans arrived.
'A completely different story': 300 million-year-old fossils reveal the first vertebrate land dwellers weren't what we thought, researchers claim
Our ancient four-legged ancestors didn't have an amphibian-like life cycle when they began walking on land, according to a new study of rare fossils found near Chicago.
Lucy’s hunter revealed: Giant crocodile terrorized early human ancestors
A newly identified crocodile species nicknamed “Lucy’s hunter” prowled Ethiopia’s rivers when Lucy’s species walked the Earth more than 3 million years ago. The giant predator was likely the most dangerous animal in the ecosystem and may have regularly hunted early human relatives.
Scientists discover ancient single-celled ancestors still live on in your blood
Scientists uncovered evidence that human blood cells may trace their origins back to single-celled ancestors that lived 700 million years ago. By rebuilding the evolutionary family tree of blood cells, the team revealed how today’s immune system grew from some of Earth’s earliest life forms.
When Did Crabs Evolve Their Iconic Sideways Scuttle? Scientists Traced It to a 200-Million-Year-Old Common Ancestor
The findings suggest that their famous lateral movement evolved just once. It may have helped the animals rapidly spread and diversify because traveling in two directions meant they could easily escape predators
Scientists think they’ve cracked the mystery of human right-handedness
A new study suggests humans became overwhelmingly right-handed because of two major evolutionary shifts: walking on two legs and developing much larger brains. Researchers found that as human ancestors evolved, their right-hand preference steadily intensified — transforming a mild tendency into one of humanity’s most distinctive traits.
Protein reveals the oldest episode of sex and procreation among human species
Chinese scientists obtain the first molecular evidence of interbreeding between our ancestor ‘Homo erectus’ and the Denisovans, relatives of the Neanderthals
How Ancient Centipede Ancestors Conquered the Earth
A long-neglected fossil seems to show the evolutionary leap that let the ancestors of today’s many-legged arthropods crawl forth from the seas.
Course on science museums travels to the United Kingdom
Every child can recall their first trip to a museum and the sense of wonder and excitement that comes from laying eyes on the real-life remnants of a dinosaur or the preserved artifacts of our ancestors. For a group of students taking a course on the impacts of colonization on science museums, that spark was ignited by all the work that went into the completion of those museum exhibits.
All Life on Earth Comes From One Single Ancestor. And It's So Much Older Than We Thought.
All Life on Earth Comes From One Single Ancestor. And It's So Much Older Than We Thought.
All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA—and it likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation.
Malaria didn’t just kill early humans, it shaped who we became
Long before humans spread across the globe, a deadly disease may have quietly shaped where our ancestors lived—and even how we evolved. New research reveals that malaria didn’t just threaten early human survival; it actively pushed populations away from high-risk regions across Africa, fragmenting groups over tens of thousands of years. This separation influenced how different populations met, mixed, and exchanged genes, helping shape the genetic diversity we see today.
Why do crabs walk sideways? Scientists trace it back 200 million years
Crabs’ famous sideways walk may trace back to a single evolutionary moment 200 million years ago. Researchers found that most modern crabs inherited this trait from one ancestor—and never looked back. The movement likely gave them an edge, helping them dodge predators with quick, unpredictable bursts. It’s a rare example of a behavior evolving once and then dominating an entire group.
The shocking origin of human eyes traces back to an ancient “cyclops”
A bizarre, cyclops-like creature from nearly 600 million years ago may hold the key to how your eyes—and even your sleep cycle—evolved. Scientists have discovered that all vertebrates, including humans, trace their vision back to a single light-sensitive “median eye” perched atop a worm-like ancestor’s head. As this ancient animal shifted from a sedentary to a more active lifestyle, it lost and then reinvented its vision, eventually giving rise to the paired, image-forming eyes we rely on today.
Scientists found a “lost world” of animals that shouldn’t exist yet
A remarkable fossil discovery in southwest China is rewriting the story of how complex animal life began, showing that many key animal groups appeared millions of years earlier than scientists once believed. Dating back over 540 million years, the fossils reveal a surprisingly diverse and advanced ecosystem from the late Ediacaran period—before the famous Cambrian explosion. Among the finds are early relatives of starfish, worm-like creatures, and even ancestors of animals with backbones, suggesting that the roots of modern life were already taking shape.
Fossils from China show complex life evolved millions of years earlier than once thought
Newfound fossils from China suggest that complex animals were around millions of years earlier than thought, among them possibly our vertebrate ancestors.
Scientists Think Our Ancestors Ate Toxic Plants—And Lived to Tell The Tale
A new study from a 7,000-year-old settlement in North Macedonia reveals evidence that ancient peoples near the Mediterranean processed toxic plants for safe consumption.
Fossil of Pincer-Wielding Crawler Reveals Origins of Spiders, Scorpions and Others
Researchers argue that a newly examined specimen found decades ago in Utah provides new clues to the ancestors of chelicerates before the group hit it big on land.
Decapodiform evolutionary tree
The researchers employed multiple decapodiformes genomes along with a robust model of evolution and fossil evidence. Their evolutionary tree branches into 4 sections in the Cretaceous period, then sees no further branching until after the K-Pg extinction event, when rapid diversification occurred. Each final line end marks a different species. Of the major orders of decapodiformes, just oegopsida and spirulida remain in the deep ocean habitats of their ancestors.
18 million-year-old fossils of ape found in Africa, but in an unexpected place
The ancestor of apes was long thought to come from East Africa, but newly discovered fossils in Egypt may prompt a rethink.
Scientists open a million-year-old time capsule beneath New Zealand
Deep inside a cave, scientists uncovered fossils from 16 species, including a newfound kākāpō ancestor that may have been able to fly. These remains reveal that New Zealand’s ecosystems were constantly disrupted by volcanic eruptions and rapid climate shifts. Long before humans, waves of extinction and replacement reshaped the islands’ wildlife. It’s a rare window into a missing chapter of natural history.
All of Life Has the Same Ancestor. Scientists Are Still Figuring Out How Old It Is.
Before we were anything, we were microbes.
A large fossil leg bone hints at T. rex’s origins, but scientists disagree
A new analysis of a large fossil shinbone suggests T. rex ancestors came from North America instead of Asia. Not everyone agrees.
An odd-nosed crocodile ate our prehistoric ancestors
‘Lucy’ probably needed to watch her back.
Where did magic mushrooms come from? Scientists just got closer to an answer
Scientists just discovered a new species of magic mushroom, Psilocybe ochraceocentrata, that appears to have shared a common ancestor with the popular Psilocybe cubensis some 1.5 million years ago.
Mysterious Asgard microbes may point to the origins of complex life
Scientists are trying to understand how complex life emerged on Earth about 2 billion years ago. Our microbial ancestors could be the key.
Bizarro salamander ancestor was an evolutionary oddball
Paleontologists say 'Tanyka amnicola' had a jawbone that's a real head-scratcher.
Teeth smaller than a fingertip reveal the first primate ancestor
Tiny, tooth-sized fossils have just reshaped the story of our deepest ancestry. Paleontologists have discovered the southernmost remains ever found of Purgatorius—the earliest-known relative of all primates, including humans—in Colorado’s Denver Basin. Previously thought to be confined to Montana and parts of Canada, this shrew-sized, tree-dwelling mammal now appears to have spread southward soon after the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs.
The ancient human ancestor ‘Little Foot’ gets a new face
A new digital reconstruction of the face of an early Australopithecus specimen helps add details about the origins of our own species.
Scientists Found 6,000-Year-Old Human Remains. No Other People Share Their DNA.
If they have no ancestors or descendants, then who are they?
Scientists uncover oxygen-loving ancestor of all complex life
For decades, scientists have believed that complex life began when two very different microbes joined forces, eventually giving rise to plants, animals, and fungi. But one major puzzle remained: how could these organisms have met if one depended on oxygen and the other supposedly lived without it? New research suggests the answer lies in ancient microbes called Asgard archaea.
All Life on Earth Has One Common Ancestor. Scientists Think These Genes Predate It.
Scientists think they’ve found a way to investigate the creation of cell membranes and DNA genomes that gave rise to the last universal common ancestor.
Scientists find genes that existed before all life on Earth
Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these rare genes, researchers can investigate how early cells worked and what features of life emerged first. New computational tools are now helping scientists unlock this hidden chapter of evolution.
These 773,000-year-old fossils may reveal our shared human ancestor
Fossils from a Moroccan cave have been dated with remarkable accuracy to about 773,000 years ago, thanks to a magnetic signature locked into the surrounding sediments. The hominin remains show a blend of ancient and more modern features, placing them near a pivotal branching point in human evolution. These individuals likely represent an African population close to the last common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neandertals, and Denisovans.
Why our ancestors had straight teeth without braces
Small jaws mean big problems for modern humans.
Science news this week: A runaway black hole, a human ancestor discovered in Casablanca cave, and vaccine schedule slashed
Jan. 10, 2025: Our weekly roundup of the latest science in the news, as well as a few fascinating articles to keep you entertained over the weekend.
Tiny bump on 7 million-year-old fossil suggests ancient ape walked upright — and might even be a human ancestor
The way Sahaleanthropus tchadensis moved has long been debated. The discovery of a small bump on the front of the thigh bone is "beyond convincing" evidence this ape was bipedal.
Fossils unearthed in Morocco are first from little-understood period of human evolution
Fossils unearthed in Morocco are the first from a little-understood period of human evolution and may be remains of a mysterious human ancestor.
Last common ancestor of modern humans and Neanderthals possibly found in Casablanca, Morocco
A collection of bones from Casablanca holds important new clues to the origins of modern humans and Neanderthals.
A legendary fossil is forcing scientists to rethink human origins
One of the most complete human ancestor fossils ever found may belong to an entirely new species, according to an international research team. The famous “Little Foot” skeleton from South Africa has long been debated, but new analysis suggests it doesn’t truly match any known Australopithecus species. Instead, researchers say its unique mix of features points to a previously unidentified human relative, reshaping ideas about early human diversity.
This ancient fossil could rewrite the story of human origins
Scientists may have cracked the case of whether a seven-million-year-old fossil could walk upright. A new study found strong anatomical evidence that Sahelanthropus tchadensis was bipedal, including a ligament attachment seen only in human ancestors. Despite its ape-like appearance and small brain, its leg and hip structure suggest it moved confidently on two legs. The finding places bipedalism near the very root of the human family tree.
Fresh bone analysis makes case for earliest ‘ancestor of humankind’, but doubts remain
Scientists argue ape-like Sahelanthropus tchadensis that lived in Africa 7m years ago is best contender but more fossils are needed
When did humanity take its first step? Scientists say they now know.
A new analysis of fossils uncovered in Central Africa offers additional evidence that a human ancestor walked upright 7 million years ago.
10 things we learned about our human ancestors in 2025
Findings about our human ancestors continue to surprise us, especially those from 2025.
All Animals, Plants, And Fungi On Earth Can Be Traced Back To A Common Ancestor: The "Asgardians"
From humans and dinosaurs to starfish and seagrass, we are all Asgardian.
Scientists claim 'Lucy' may not be our direct ancestor after all, stoking fierce debate
Recent fossil finds could mean that "Lucy" wasn't our direct ancestor, some scientists say. Others strongly disagree.
Today's biggest science news: 'Little Foot' potential unknown human ancestor | Geminids peak | Comet 3I/ATLAS closest approach
Monday, Dec. 15, 2025: Your daily feed of the biggest discoveries and breakthroughs making headlines.
BBC Audio | BBC Inside Science | Would our ancestors have benefited from early neanderthals making fire?
New evidence shows that early neanderthals made fire 350 thousand years before we thought.
Ancient Humans Were Making Fire 350,000 Years Earlier Than Scientists Realized
Making fire on demand was a milestone in the lives of our early ancestors. But the question of when that skill first arose has been difficult for scientists to pin down