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 ...

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe. Using advanced analysis based ...

A novel genetic model suggests that the ancestors of modern humans came from two distinct populations that split and reconnected during our evolutionary history. When you purchase through links on our ...

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 ...

Outlining the problem / P. A. Mellars, M. J. Aitken and C. B. Stringer -- Uranium-series dating and the origin of modern man / Henry P. Schwarcz -- Luminescence dating relevant to human origins / M. J ...

The fossil and genetic evidence agree that modern humans originated in Africa. The most genetically diverse human populations—the groups that have had the longest time to pick up novel mutations—live ...

A crushed ancient skull may hold clues to the origins of ancient humans. Digital reconstruction of a crushed skull from an ancient human relative could rewrite the timeline of human evolution, ...

ANTHMAI copy has bookplate: Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Gift of Jayne H. Plank. "Modern Humans is a vivid account of the most recent--and perhaps the most important--phase of human evolution: ...

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 ...