For a half century, the iconic "Lucy" fossil species, Australopithecus afarensis, has held the title of being the most likely direct ancestor of all humans. But as the list of ancient human relatives ...

Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same place ...

Scientists say they have solved the mystery of the Burtele foot, a set of 3.4 million-year-old bones found in Ethiopia in 2009. The fossils, along with others unearthed more recently, have now been ...

The ancient skeleton known as “Little Foot” has long been a celebrity in paleoanthropology, but a new wave of research is pushing it into even more provocative territory. Instead of fitting neatly ...

Natural history is a difficult thing to conceptualize. You’ve got eons of undocumented progress, like the evolution of many species. Take, for example, the Australopithecus, an ancient great ape ...

The ape-like human ancestor Australopithecus—perhaps best known from the iconic fossil ‘Lucy’—might not have had much meat on its menu. After examining more than 3.3-million-year-old remains from ...

One of the most complete human ancestor fossils ever found may belong to an entirely new species, according to an ...

New research reveals that our early ancestors, the Australopithecus, lived almost entirely on plants and likely didn’t eat meat at all. By analyzing the nitrogen isotopes in their fossilized tooth ...

The classification of one of the most complete human ancestor fossils ever discovered, the skeleton known as Little Foot, has been called into question by an international research team led from La ...