Fossils unearthed from an Ethiopian site not far from where the famous hominid Ardi’s partial skeleton was found suggest that her species was evolving different ways of walking upright more than 4 ...

It’s been 4.4 million years since a female now nicknamed Ardi lived in eastern Africa, but she still knows how to make an entrance. Analyses of her partial skeleton and the remains of at least 36 of ...

The first members of the human lineage lack many features that distinguish us from other primates. Although it has been a difficult quest, we are closer than ever to knowing the mother of us all. Aa ...

A meticulous study of the ankle joint of this 4.4-million-year-old ancestor positions this species as a crucial link, bearing both primitive traits for climbing and early adaptations for upright ...

More than 1 million years before the early hominin known as Lucy was striding across the Afar region of Ethiopia, the lesser-known Ardipithecus ramidus roamed approximately the same area. Now, a team ...

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 ...

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 ...

Our distant ancestors may have swung from branches and knuckle-walked like a chimpanzee – challenging recent thinking that the earliest hominins did neither. That is the conclusion of an analysis of 4 ...

Last month (October 2009), Science magazine devoted an entire extraordinary issue to what may be our oldest ancestor: Ardipithecus ramidus. A. ramidus was discovered in the mid-1990s in Ethiopia by a ...