In 1958, a seemingly insignificant discovery made by farmers in the Guangdong province of southern China would soon challenge centuries of human evolutionary theory. While collecting bat guano for ...

We looked at fossil teeth from hominins (humans and our closest extinct relatives) from the Omo Valley in Ethiopia, where we can see traces of more than two million years of human evolution, as well ...

Dart surmised that Australopithecus adults would have had a brain capacity similar to that of a gorilla. However, the skull was clearly that of a small child.

In spite of its inauspicious discovery, after the skull was reassembled, Mrs. Ples became the most complete australopithecine skull ever found, dating back 2.35 million years.

Could the intelligence of Australopithecines be more developed than we previously thought? Recent discoveries about these ancestors raise questions about our evolution. At the heart of human history, ...

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to ...

Fossil specimens have dated the species back as far as 4.2 million years ago and as recently as 3.8 million years ago, based on a skull found in Ethiopia back in 2016.

The skull exhibits growth patterns that would result in a larger and differently rotated occipital lobe of the brain than that in juvenile Australopithecine specimens such as the 'Taung child'.

The floor really used to be lava—sort of Connecting the ash layer at Omo Kibish with the Shala caldera eruption makes the oldest known Homo sapiens skull about 36,000 years older than a previous ...

The face doesn't stick out in front of the skull like an australopithecine or a modern ape, although the upper jaw still protrudes a bit. Large eye sockets sit beneath heavy, curving brow ridges.

It seems that Australopithecus afarensis, a species of early human, may have had a lunate sulcus—a brain region—which shifted its positioning to become less pronounced in modern humans.