Human newborns arrive remarkably underdeveloped. The reason lies in a deep evolutionary trade-off between big brains, bipedalism and the limits of motherhood.

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

Human evolution has long been tied to growing brain size, and new research suggests prenatal hormones may have played a surprising role. By studying the relative lengths of index and ring fingers — a ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A digital reconstruction of a million-year-old skull suggests humans may have diverged from our ancient ancestors 400,000 years ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

One of the biggest mysteries in human evolution has just been solved. In 2010, a groundbreaking genetic analysis revealed that east Asia was once home to a previously unknown group of enigmatic ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution finds that the relatively high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in the past. The paper is titled "A general ...

Shaw Badenhorst works for the University of the Witwatersrand. He receives funding from GENUS, the National Research Foundation and the Palaeontological Scientific Trust. South Africa has one of the ...