When archaeologists unearthed small cat bones in China dating back some 5,400 years, they figured cats had been hanging out in early Chinese farming settlements since the Neolithic Period.

The discovery of plague DNA in a 4,000-year-old sheep bone is rewriting the story of one of humanity’s most feared pathogens, ...

Thousands of years ago, the Sahara Desert was a lush and fertile landscape, home to thriving communities. A new study ...

A stunning discovery in Roman Britain has revealed fingerprints left on liquid gypsum used to prepare bodies for burial, ...

New fossils link a strange 3.4-million-year-old foot to Australopithecus deyiremeda, a species that mixed climbing skills with its own style of bipedal walking. The evidence shows that multiple early ...

The study bolsters one hypothesis of when people arrived at the landmass that became Australia and other islands, and ...

Long-buried traces of Denisovan DNA have resurfaced in modern human genomes — and they may still be working for us today.

The findings, described in the journal Nature, push back the earliest known date for controlled fire-making by roughly ...

In 2004, archaeologists discovered a new species of ancient human, Homo floresiensis, on the Indonesian island of Flores. Nicknamed “the hobbit,” this three-foot-tall hominin lived between about ...

Two different groups migrated to what become Australia and New Guinea 60,000 years ago, and researchers are only just beginning to grasp their genetic data.

Researchers say they’ve uncovered new evidence in present-day England that could reshape our understanding of human evolution ...

More than a decade after the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, scientists are still working to understand how ...