Something about a warm, flickering campfire draws in modern humans. Where did that uniquely human impulse come from? How did our ancestors learn to make fire? How long have they been making it?

A new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...

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 ...

On Valentine’s Day in 2018, a team of scientists walked across a flat expanse in the badlands of northeastern Ethiopia, scanning the ground for fossils. An eagle-eyed field assistant, Omar Abdulla, ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the ...

Discover the latest news, features and articles about the origin of the human species and what makes us different from our ...

Many people hold the view that evolution in humans has come to a halt. But while modern medicine and technologies have changed the environment in which evolution operates, many scientists are in ...

A timeline of genetic changes in millions of years of human evolution shows that variants linked to higher intelligence appeared most rapidly around 500,000 years ago, and were closely followed by ...

Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Manish Arora receives funding from US National Institutes of Health. He is the founder of Linus Biotechnology, a start-up ...