Smithsonian Magazine on MSN
The Top Human Evolution Discoveries of 2025, From the Intriguing Neanderthal Diet to the Oldest Western European Face Fossil
This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...
Studying human evolution involves piecing together scattered clues about how we survived against tough odds. One of the biggest mysteries is understanding how large or small ancient human populations ...
In a recent review published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, researchers discussed the role of climatic shifts and vegetation changes in driving the evolution within the subfamily ...
For decades, the dominant theory in human evolution suggested that modern humans descended from a single ancestral lineage in Africa. However, groundbreaking new research from the University of ...
A braided stream, not a family tree: How new evidence upends our understanding of how humans evolved
Evidence is mounting that the evolution of our species is more convoluted than we imagined — more like a braided stream than a branching tree. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...
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, ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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