A 1.6-million-year-old Ethiopian skull blends ancestor and descendant features, rewriting the origin story of Homo erectus.

A digital reconstruction of a million-year-old skull suggests humans may have diverged from our ancient ancestors 400,000 years earlier than thought and in Asia, not Africa, a study found. The ...

A million-year-old human skull found in China suggests that our species, Homo sapiens, began to emerge at least half a million years earlier than we thought, researchers are claiming in a new study.

HUBEI, China — A badly crushed cranium unearthed decades ago from a riverbank in central China that once defied classification is now shaking up the human family tree, according to a new analysis.

He lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, eking out an existence in what is today central China. Sporting a squat neck and a big brain, he likely wielded tools made of stone and hunted or scavenged ...

“Human evolution is a tree,” said Prof. Xijun Ni of Fudan University, who led the research along with Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum in London. “This tree had many branches, and there ...

In 1990, an ancient human skull was unearthed in China’s Hubei Province that was so badly deformed during fossilization that it was hard to gauge its significance. A new analysis now indicates that ...

One of the biggest mysteries in human evolution has just been solved. In 2010, a groundbreaking genetic analysis revealed that east Asia was once home to a previously unknown group of enigmatic ...

A 146,000-year-old skull recovered near Harbin, China, by scientists decades ago has now been found to belong to the Denisovans, an extinct relation to modern humans who lived in Siberia and East Asia ...

The skull’s age and categorization as an early Denisovan ancestor would mean the group originated much earlier than thought. The researchers’ wider analysis, based on the reconstruction and more than ...