Tag Archives: Ancestors

The moment a creature dies, its DNA begins to break down. Half of it degrades every 521 years on average. By about 6.8 million years, even under ideal preservation conditions in cold, stable environments, every meaningful trace is gone. That’s a huge challenge when trying to understand our evolutionary history more deeply: Two-legged primates emerged 7 million years ago in …

The human family tree is looking more and more like an unruly bush. Paleontologists have now uncovered the teeth of two different ancient human lineages at the same site in northeastern Ethiopia. The discovery collapses the distance between the first of our genus and the last of the australopithecines in eastern Africa. The two probably coexisted. Related: Lucy Is 50: …

Credit: Ken Zirkel,the Museum of Natural History By the time “Lucy” took her final steps across the Ethiopian landscape 3 million years ago, her kind may have been living in a social world far more combative than we once imagined. A new study reveals that males of Australopithecus afarensis — the species that includes the famous fossil — were dramatically …

New research published in the American Journal of Biological Anthropology highlights the extreme sexual dimorphism in early human ancestors, revealing that some species like Australopithecus afarensis and A. africanus exhibited striking size differences between males and females. This newly uncovered information, led by anthropologist Adam D. Gordon of the University at Albany, challenges previous assumptions about early hominin social structures …

When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The Saami people, who are indigenous to Finland, speak a Uralic language. | Credit: Getty Images Present-day speakers of Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian have substantial Siberian ancestry, a new study of ancient genomes finds. These roots likely spread westward from a group of …

Present-day speakers of Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian have substantial Siberian ancestry, a new study of ancient genomes finds. These roots likely spread westward from a group of people living in the forest steppes of the Altai Mountains of Central and East Asia 4,500 years ago. Ancient DNA revealed that this group was patrilineal, or organized based on descent from fathers. …

An unusual fossil brain suggests that the ancestors of spiders and other arachnids may have once scuttled around the sea, rather than on land as was long thought, a new study finds. The fossil shows that certain features of the brain of a now-extinct animal known as Mollisonia symmetrica are arranged backward compared with those of most modern arthropods, a …

A groundbreaking discovery in southwestern Kenya has sent shockwaves through the world of archaeology. In the region near Lake Victoria, archaeologists have uncovered ancient stone tools that could rewrite the history of early human development. These tools, which could be up to 3 million years old, were found at a site near fossilized remains of Paranthropus, a distant human ancestor. …