You may have heard science has reconsidered its view of Neanderthals but did you know human hybrid species played a key role in our evolution?
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Articles on Neanderthals
Displaying 1 - 20 of 73 articles
Here’s what we can learn from our closest extinct relatives.
Around 200,000 years ago, people were living who were as intelligent as us.
The mysterious Denisovans left DNA traces in populations across Southeast Asia and Australasia, but until now no physical signs of their presence outside Eurasia had been found.
Stone artifacts and a fossil tooth point to Homo sapiens living at Grotte Mandrin 54,000 years ago, at a time when Neanderthals were still living in Europe.
What looks like a bright, sharp dividing line between humans and other animals is really an artefact of extinction.
A new analysis of a ‘lost’ skull rewrites the recent family tree of the human species, showing our closest relatives lived in China.
The 140,000-year-old skull fossils are leading to more questions than answers. Also found was the oldest intact campfire ever found in the open air.
Our research has also uncovered major long-term changes in ancient animal populations at Denisova Cave, and has provided the first direct evidence of Homo sapiens having lived there.
Like rings in tree trunks, the layers of our teeth carry a detailed record of our growth — and reveal lead contamination is common.
Genes that control blood type and are involved in inflammation have been associated with more severe disease.
Neanderthal-human hybrid brains grown in the lab give fascinating insights into evolution.
A war with Neanderthals makes a compelling narrative but the evidence is limited is best.
Did Neanderthal military superiority delay our migration out of Africa?
These findings represent the earliest evidence for Homo sapiens on the Arabian Peninsula, and demonstrates the importance of Arabia for understanding human prehistory.
The invention of the humble bag was a game changer. Without it, we’d still be running in the woods with our hands full.
Early humans in Africa may have interbred with a ghost population that likely split from the ancestors of humans and Neanderthals between 360,000 and 1.02 million years ago.
Neanderthals living in a cave in southern Siberia made distinctive stone tools that can be traced to their ancestral homeland in eastern Europe — an intercontinental journey of more than 3,000 km.
20 years ago, who could predict how much more researchers would know today about the human past – let alone what they could learn from a thimble of dirt, a scrape of dental plaque, or satellites in space.
300,000 years ago, there were lots of different species of human. Now it’s only us – and we’re probably the reason why.
Top contributors
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Honorary Associate Professor, UNSW Sydney
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Director, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), University of Wollongong
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Senior Research Associate in Translational Genomics, University of Oxford
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Emeritus Professor, School of Humanities, University of New England
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ARC Laureate Fellow, University of Adelaide
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Associate Professor, Southern Cross University
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Professor, University of Wollongong
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Senior Lecturer in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Bath
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Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University
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Associate Professor in Earth Sciences, Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of Wollongong
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Professor of Archaeological Theory and Method, University of Liverpool
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Professor in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution & Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University
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Honorary Research Fellow, UCL
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Associate Professor, Flinders University
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Professor of Evolutionary Palaeoecology, Bournemouth University
