Human evolution is often told as a tidy story of adaptation, yet some of our most familiar body parts still defy straightforward explanation. From the jut of the human chin to the curve of the outer ...

Humans have lived with fire for over a million years. Scientists now say burn injuries may have influenced human evolution and healing.

Learn how repeated burn injuries may have acted as a form of natural selection, influencing human genes linked to healing and immune response.

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...

The evolution of the human species is marked by an increase in brain size. Now new research suggests that could be partly dependent on increases in prenatal estrogen—revealed by looking at the length ...

Vertebrate morphology exhibits remarkable diversity, reflecting a complex interplay of developmental processes, genetic regulation and environmental pressures. This variation arises from a combination ...

Humans’ exposure to high temperature burn injuries may have played an important role in our evolutionary development, shaping how our bodies heal, fight infection, and sometimes fail under extreme ...

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and ...

Human evolution has long been tied to growing brain size, and new research suggests prenatal hormones may have played a surprising role. By studying the relative lengths of index and ring fingers — a ...

Shaw Badenhorst works for the University of the Witwatersrand. He receives funding from GENUS, the National Research Foundation and the Palaeontological Scientific Trust. South Africa has one of the ...