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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

The skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, an ancient fossil dubbed "Ardi," is radically changing our ideas about mankind's origins. Kent State University's C. Owen Lovejoy says Ardi shows our ancestors ...

Newly discovered human-like footprints from Crete may put the established narrative of early human evolution to the test. The footprints are approximately 5.7 million years old and were made at a time ...