Picture this: 4.4 million years ago, a small female creature named Ardi roamed the woodlands of what is now Ethiopia. She was not fully ape and not fully human. She was something beautifully ...

This release is available in Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese and Amharic. In a special issue of Science, an international team of scientists has for the first time thoroughly described Ardipithecus ...

The oldest distinguishing feature between humans and our ape cousins is our ability to walk on two legs—a trait known as bipedalism. Among mammals, only humans and our ancestors perform this atypical ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. – Among the many surprises associated with the discovery of the oldest known, nearly complete skeleton of a hominid is the finding that this species took its first steps toward ...

A new method to estimate sexual dimorphism in fossil species near the base of our family tree has been just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), through the joint ...

Tim White, Berhane Asfaw, and Gen Suwa, who have long worked together unearthing and analyzing fossils in Africa, made a new and remarkable discovery in 1993. In Ethiopia, they found hominid skull, ...

A series of new fossil discoveries in the 1990s generated great interest among scientists involved in research into human origins, pushing the date for the beginnings of bipedalism back to more than 4 ...

Lucy, that starlet among ancient human relatives, may have shared the stage with a hominin very different from herself, a newly found fossil suggests. Out of the Ethiopian desert, researchers have ...

Paleontologists searching the bleak desert of central Ethiopia have unearthed the fossilized bones of a 5.5 million-year-old creature that appears to be the oldest human ancestor yet discovered. The ...

WASHINGTON - Fossils have long provided snapshots of the human family tree, but a new find in Africa gives scientists a kind of mini home movie showing man's primal development. Because the ...