Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. In The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession With Human Origins, the intellectual historian Stefanos Geroulanos, ...

✅ Know Your Terms: Hominin refers to all humans, plus our ancestral species who walked upright on two feet (including members of the genera Homo, Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and Ardipithecus ).

For decades, scientists believed modern humans came from one main ancestral group in Africa, an idea known as the 'Out of Africa' model. But new DNA research suggests the story may be far more ...

In the summer of 1856, laborers at a limestone quarry near Düsseldorf were clearing mud and chert out of a cave when they turned up a fossilized skull. It was long and elliptical, with wide sinuses ...

A collection of 3-million-year-old bones unearthed 50 years ago in Ethiopia changed our understanding of human origins. Fifty years ago, our understanding of human origins began to change with the ...