In the humid foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, deep within a carnivore’s bloody lair, an early human ancestor fought a life-or-death struggle, and lost. He had entered the den on a scavenging ...

Found in Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, Homo habilis marked the dawn of the human genus. Known as the “handy man,” this early ancestor carved the world’s first stone tools, shaping both the landscape and ...

Homo habilis ("handy man", "skillful person") is a species of the genus Homo, which lived from approximately 2.5 million to 1.8 million years ago at the beginning of the Pleistocene. The definition of ...

In 2003, archaeologists from Indonesia and Australia discovered the bones of a new species of human, named Homo floresiensis, in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Its short stature – about ...

Almost 2 million years ago, a young ancient human died beside a spring near a lake in what is now Tanzania, in eastern Africa ...

A transitional fossil in a period we have little on “One of paleoanthropology’s main research goals has been to fiddle the temporal and evolutionary gap between these early and later phenomena,” ...

Around 2 million years ago, prehistoric humans in East Africa turned the tables on the carnivores that had previously terrorized them, learning not only to fend off these predators but also steal ...

As more and more fossil ancestors have been found, our genus has become more and more inclusive, incorporating more members that look less like us, Homo sapiens. By getting to know these other ...

These files consist of 3D scans of historical objects in the collections of the Smithsonian and may be downloaded by you only for non-commercial, educational, and ...

A new study may be about to rewrite a part of our early human history. It has long been thought that Homo habilis, often considered the first true human species, was the one to turn the tables on the ...