(Reuters) - The incorporation of meat into the diet was a milestone for the human evolutionary lineage, a potential catalyst for advances such as increased brain size. But scientists have struggled to ...

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Fossils of early ...

A new study led by paleoanthropologists reveals that Lucy's species Australopithecus afarensis had an ape-like brain. However, the protracted brain growth suggests that -- as is the case in humans -- ...

The five kilometres of passages and chambers in the Sterkfontein Cave system northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, have yielded about 800 Australopithecus specimens in the past 90 years. They are ...

Australopithecus afarensis© "Australopithecus afarensis" by Rod Waddington is licensed under BY-SA 2.0. Natural history is a difficult thing to conceptualize. You’ve got eons of undocumented progress, ...

Everything we know about the group of human ancestors called australopiths comes from just a few dozen fossils. But a skull discovered in Ethiopia is now changing anthropologists' understanding of the ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Little Foot’s face, however, has long eluded characterization—the fossil’s skull was smashed in after an estimated 3.67 million ...

The recovery of new lumbar vertebrae from the lower back of a single individual of the human relative, Australopithecus sediba, and portions of other vertebrae of the same female from Malapa, South ...

After 13 years of meticulous excavation of the nearly complete skeleton of the Australopithecus fossil named Little Foot, South African and French scientists have now convincingly shown that it is ...

The high-security fossil vault at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg, contains treasure more precious than the gold that paid for the university’s establishment. It is the ...

Spinal bones of an extinct human relative have been found in lumps of rock blasted out of a South African cave and used to reconstruct one of the most complete back fossils of any hominin. The spine ...