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 -- ...

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New dating of sediments from the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa suggests some Australopithecus fossils are around 3.4 to 3.7 million years old, roughly a million years older than many earlier ...

Natural history is a difficult thing to conceptualize. You’ve got eons of undocumented progress, like the evolution of many species. Take, for example, the Australopithecus, an ancient great ape ...

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 ...

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 ...

Sophisticated scanning technology is revealing intriguing secrets about Little Foot, the remarkable fossil of an early human forerunner that inhabited South Africa 3.67 million years ago during a ...

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 ...

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 ...

"I imagine there might be some though who will be skeptical -- as is always the case." Their argument centers on a timeline: The oldest known Homo fossil, a jawbone, is dated at 2.8 million years old, ...

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 ...