Human beings may have suddenly doubled their age thanks to some recent research on a group of fossilised skulls from China, known as Yunxian 1 and 2. Previously classified as Homo erectus, they have now been designated as belonging to the Denisovan group, based on skull shape.
New analysis of a hominin skull previously believed to represent a new species of ancient human suggests that it may in fact be a Denisovan. The Denisovans were first discovered in 2010, when ancient DNA from a finger bone in…
The emergence of bipedal walking has long been recognised as a central aspect of hominid evolution, but much less is known about the development of running. Recently, a team of researchers from the UK and the Netherlands set out to…
Wonderwerk Cave was first excavated in the 1940s. Its archaeological stratigraphy comprises evidence of human activity spanning from the Early Stone Age in South Africa to the present day.
The discovery of a two-million-year-old skull in South Africa is shedding important new light on microevolution in an early hominin species, as Jesse Martin and Angeline Leece reveal.
Footprints in the desert The earliest-known human footprints from the Arabian Peninsula have been discovered in an ancient lake deposit in the south-west of the Nefud Desert. They were discovered as part of the Palaeodeserts Project, which is studying the…