Africa has long been known as the cradle of humanity. Fossils, tools and genetics all point there. Yet the deeper story of how the first modern humans lived, moved and mixed has stayed blurry. Too ...

Most modern humans with non-African ancestry carry small amounts of Neanderthal DNA across much of their genome but have little-to-none on their X chromosomes. New research from Penn challenges an old ...

Explore the complex 2-million-year journey of human evolution. From the "Handy Man" in Africa to the interbreeding of ...

Using a specially developed simulation model, researchers at the University of Cologne have traced and analysed the dynamics of possible encounters between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans ...

Did modern humans erase Neanderthals, or did our close cousins fade away for reasons that had little to do with us? A pair of major papers in Science and Nature on Dec. 12, 2024, sharpen that question ...

The remains of the world's oldest musical instruments and human figurines suggest that music and artistic depictions of the human form may have first developed in Germany around 40,000 years ago, say ...

Tens of thousands of years ago, the first artists painted images on the walls of caves. They collected, painted and ground holes in shells, presumably to wear. It was the very first art, created by ...