The evidence of a much earlier presence of humans in Indonesia was found more than 100 years ago. But only now has the age of the fossil teeth been accurately dated.
Hominin skull casts (L-R) Australopithecus afarensis, Homo habilis, Homo ergaster, Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis.
Roger Seymour/South Australian Museum
New research into how early humans spread across the world settles several long-running debates.
New research challenges a previous view that humans got to America via this area, where an ice-free corridor existed during the last ice age.
Mikkel Winther Pedersen
A new study suggests the first humans probably got to America from Siberia via the Pacific coast rather than through a corridor between two giant ice sheets, as previously thought.
The 37,000 year old Deep Skull from Niah Cave in Borneo is the oldest modern human skeleton found in island Southeast Asia.
Darren Curnoe
Another look at a skull unearthed in Malaysian Borneo 60 years ago can shed light on the mystery of how early humans moved throughout Southeast Asia thousands of years ago.
Not all technologies are created equal. Researchers devised a new model to explain why, after eons of nothing much new, we sometimes see an explosion of innovation in the archaeological record.
The look of love? Human meets Neanderthal.
DrMikeBaxter/wikimedia
The great grandfather of one of Europe's earliest modern humans had sex with Neanderthals.
Very few people today live a true hunter-gatherer lifestyle – and Paleo diets likely oversimplify what would have been on the table many millennia ago.
Thiery
Reconstructions of human evolution are prone to simple, overly-tidy scenarios. Our ancestors, for example, stood on two legs to look over tall grass, or began to speak because, well, they finally had something…
An Inupiat Eskimo family from Alaska in 1929, whose ancestors would have crossed Beringia thousands of years previously.
Edward Curtis
The theory that the Americas were populated by humans crossing from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge was first proposed as far back as 1590, and has been generally accepted since the 1930s. But genetic…
For days when Lucozade and a Mars bar just won’t cut it.
barclakj
During the warm periods between ice ages stretching from 500,000 to 200,000 years ago, the southern parts of Britain were occupied by a species of ancient human, Homo heidelbergensis. These hunter-gatherers…
Symbolic behaviour like burial brings us and Neanderthals of the past closer.
Gareth Fuller/PA
William Rendu, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS)
Ever since the discovery of the well preserved, nearly complete, 50,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton in a pit dug in a cave in La Chapelle-aux-Saints, southwest France, it has been long debated as to…
It should not be a surprise that East Africa was a hotbed of evolution, because over the last five million years everything about the landscape has changed. The extraordinary forces of plate tectonics…
Cut from the sea bed this 20m long core contains 100,000 years of climate history.
Ian Hall
Responding to a crisis often brings out the best in people. Certainly it has in the past, when sudden changes in climate during the Middle Stone Age sparked off surges of cultural evolution and innovation…
Could we have found the first artist’s studio in human history? We may well have. We all recognise the material signs of wealth. Fast cars, large yachts and sparkling bling all tell us who has more. Crowns…
Associate Professor, University of New South Wales Sydney, and Chief Investigator, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, UNSW
