Any hominid fossil find with molar teeth can be plugged into a new equation that reveals its species’ prenatal growth rate.
Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images
Using a new equation based on today’s primates, scientists can take a few molar teeth from an extinct fossil species and reconstruct exactly how fast their offspring grew during gestation.
A Neanderthal father and his daughter.
Tom Björklund
Ancient DNA from Neanderthal fossils in southern Siberia reveals a small community with close family ties – including a father and his teenage daughter.
Together with artifacts from the past, ancient DNA can fill in details about our ancient ancestors.
Nina R/Wikimedia Commons
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.
Three upright walkers, including Lucy (center) and two specimens of Australopithecus sediba, a human ancestor from South Africa dating back nearly 2 million years.
Image compiled by Peter Schmid and courtesy of Lee R. Berger/Wikimedia Commons
Combining evidence from archaeology, geochronology and paleoenvironmental science, researchers identified how ancient humans by Lake Malawi were the first to substantially modify their environment.
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.
Pulverized ancient bone can provide DNA to scientists for analysis.
Xin Xu Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology
The footprints of over 20 different prehistoric people, pressed into volcanic ash thousands of years ago in Tanzania, show possible evidence for sexual division of labor in this ancient community.
MRD skull.
Dale Omori, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History
A series of new studies sheds light on the population crash and extinction of the giant birds, lemurs and more that roamed the island until around A.D. 700-1000.
Sunrise at noon in the Arctic. Little exposure to sun was a piece of the genetic puzzle.
Bering Land Bridge National Preserve
Why was one gene mutation that affects hair, teeth, sweat glands and breasts ubiquitous among ice age Arctic people? New research points to the advantage it provided for ancestors of Native Americans.
We can’t observe the brain activity of extinct human species. But we can observe modern brains doing the things that our distant ancestors did, looking for clues about how ancient brains worked.
When new discoveries are jealously guarded under lock and key, science suffers.
Andy Wright
David Attenborough’s latest BBC documentary indulges wishful thinking over evidence.
Volume rendered image of the external morphology of the foot bone shows the extent of expansion of the primary bone cancer beyond the surface of the bone.
Patrick Randolph-Quinney (UCLAN)
Cancer is a deadly disease and would have been particularly lethal before the recent development of effective treatments. So why didn’t it – or our susceptibility to it – die out long ago?
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.
A particularly fruitful moment for technological innovation?
Viktor M Vasnetsov
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.