Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

Scientists have long debated how modern humans evolved. For decades, most researchers agreed that Homo sapiens came from one ancestral group in Africa, dating back 200,000 to 300,000 years. But new ...

Modern humans now permanently live on every continent except Antarctica, but it wasn't always this way. After our species, Homo sapiens, emerged in Africa at least 300,000 years ago, some eventually ...

This is something of a misnomer, for Eve was neither the first modern human nor the only woman alive 200,000 years ago. But she did live at a time when the modern human population was small—about ...

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. Humans come from Africa. This wasn’t always obvious, but ...

Modern humans are evolutionary survivors, thriving generation after generation while our ancient relatives died out. Now, new research into our brain chemistry suggests that an enzyme unique to Homo ...

Many people today simply assume that our evolution has quietly ended with the development of the modern human. It's easy to think that medicine, science, and modern living have made us "perfect" or ...

Momentous encounters -- Neanderthal ancestors -- Neanderthals and their world -- The quiet people -- The ten thousandth grandmother -- Great mobility -- The realm of the Lion Man -- Fat, flints, and ...

Denisovans, a mysterious human relative, left behind far more than a handful of fossils—they left genetic fingerprints in modern humans across the globe. Multiple interbreeding events with distinct ...