Researchers found that ancient hominids—including early humans—were exposed to lead throughout childhood, leaving chemical traces in fossil teeth. Experiments suggest this exposure may have driven ...

An international study changes the view that exposure to the toxic metal lead is largely a post-industrial phenomenon. The research reveals that our human ancestors were periodically exposed to lead ...

Humans were living in rainforests roughly 150,000 years ago, some 80,000 years earlier than was previously thought—and may have been an important center for early human evolution. This is the ...

Human evolution is often told as a tidy story of adaptation, yet some of our most familiar body parts still defy straightforward explanation. From the jut of the human chin to the curve of the outer ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Genetic information from the "Dragon Man" skull has linked the fossil, found in China, to the Denisovans. - Hebei GEO University ...

Food processing has been a part of human adaptation since deep in the past. The softening and breaking down of food left its testimony on the human body. For example, the massive teeth of our early ...

Researchers studied ancient tooth fossils and found that a gene mutation in modern humans (right) better protected them against lead and gave them an advantage over Neanderthals (left). Kyle Dykes / ...

On Valentine’s Day in 2018, a team of scientists walked across a flat expanse in the badlands of northeastern Ethiopia, scanning the ground for fossils. An eagle-eyed field assistant, Omar Abdulla, ...

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 ...

Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Manish Arora receives funding from US National Institutes of Health. He is the founder of Linus Biotechnology, a start-up ...

The tallest man to ever live was Robert Wadlow, who reached a staggering 2.72m. That's equal to a very large male ostrich or Shaquille O'Neal with two bowling pins balanced on his head. Wadlow had a ...

In 1758, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus gave humans a scientific name: Homo sapiens, which means "wise human" in Latin. Although Linnaeus grouped humans with other apes, it was English biologist ...