The oldest known footprint of our species, lightly ringed with chalk. It appears long and narrow because the trackmaker dragged their heel.
Charles Helm
Thousands of ancient genomes have been sequenced to date. A Nobel Prize highlights tremendous opportunities for aDNA, as well as challenges related to rapid growth, equity and misinformation.
Shared designs for stone tools across southern Africa show early humans had wide social connections before beginning to migrate to the rest of the world.
Fabrice Demeter (University of Copenhagen / CNRS Paris)
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.
Anatomist and anthropologist Matthew Drennan in his anthropology laboratory at the University of Cape Town in 1931.
Cape Argus, 27 August 1931
A new study doubles the age of ancient DNA in sub-Saharan Africa, revealing how people moved, mingled and had children together over the last 50,000 years.
The Grotte Mandrin rock shelter saw repeated use by Neanderthals and modern humans over millennia.
Ludovic Slimak
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.
Drilling 139 meters down to volcanic rock provided scientists with a million-year environmental record.
Human Origins Program, Smithsonian
A new environmental record for a prehistoric site in Kenya helped researchers figure out how external conditions influenced which of our ancient ancestors lived there, with what way of life.
Mason tirelessly sought to convince officials of the need to recognise and celebrate the African past, and the role that African people played in the making of modern South African society.
New research claiming indigenous Americans traveled to Polynesia is sensational, but the science is flawed and ignores other evidence.
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.
Manuel Domínguez-Rodrigo
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.
A study claims the first humans lived in a wetland around what is now northern Botswana.
Prill/Shutterstock
It’s likely our species doesn’t actually have a single origin.
The trilobite manuport (Bainella sp) from Robberg on the Cape south coast was carried at least 10 km to a small cave shelter. For scale, the bar is 10 cm long.
Author Supplied
No area of archaeology has seen such vibrant change in recent times than how we understand our family tree. Could 2019 be the year we learn more about our mysterious ancestor Homo erectus?
The dinosaur Ledumahadi mafube - reconstructed in this illustration - made headlines in 2018.
Viktor Radermacher
South Africa’s fossils can step out of the shadows of being undated and undateable.
This picture of a reconstruction of a hominin skull is one of a variety of multimedia that can be experienced in the Origins Virtual Reality experience.
Wits University
As an intellectual history of the disciplines of paleontology and paleoanthropology, Kuljan’s book is especially adept at narrating the interwoven connections between science and power.