What makes humans so smart? For a long time the answer was simple: our big brains. But new research into the tiny noggins of a recently discovered human relative called Homo naledi may challenge that ...

Lucy’s kind had small, chimplike brains that, nevertheless, grew at a slow, humanlike pace. This discovery, reported April 1 in Science Advances, shows for the first time that prolonged brain growth ...

Forget the textbook story about tool use and language sparking the dramatic evolutionary growth of the human brain. Instead, imagine ancient hominid children chasing frogs. Not for fun, but for food.

Those were venturesome steps for some ape-like creatures long ago in Africa. Dropping out of trees, they essayed a novel means of locomotion, for reasons that elude paleoanthropologists. These ...

WASHINGTON — The story of humankind is reaching back another million years as scientists learn more about “Ardi,” a hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia. The 110-pound, ...

Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue.Current Anthropology is a transnational journal devoted to research on humankind, encompassing the full range of ...

CHICAGO -- What may well turn out to be the definitive work in a debate that has been raging in palaeoanthropology for two years will be published in the November 2006 issue of Anatomical Record. The ...

An international study changes the view that exposure to the toxic metal lead is largely a post-industrial phenomenon. The research reveals that our human ancestors were periodically exposed to lead ...

In October 2004 Australian and Indonesian announced they had discovered a three-foot tall species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, that was still alive no earlier than18,000 years ago. As I ve detailed ...

It may have had a bearing on human sexuality and the development of family life. And it certainly opened the way for later toolmaking, some 2.5 million years ago, and probably set the stage for the ...