A team of paleoanthropologists has assembled the only known cranium of the extinct ape Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, revealing how the ape’s face looked. The reconstruction allows them to place ...

Human evolution is tightly connected to the environment and landscape of Africa, where our ancestors first emerged. According to the traditional scientific narrative, Africa was once a verdant idyll ...

An artist’s reconstruction of the locomotor behavior and paleoenvironment of Lufengpithecus. This extinct primate lived in East Asia during the Miocene. “It would have been about the size of a ...

A new study of a 7–8-million-year-old extinct fossil ape from China called Lufengpithecus offers new insights into the evolution of human bipedalism. The study, published in The Innovation, was ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

The fossil record of our ape ancestors in Africa is almost nonexistent for a period of about 8 or 9 million years. This long gap lasted from about 16.5 million to 7 to 9 million years ago, during the ...

Comprehensive reference genomes have now been assembled for six ape species: siamang (a Southeast Asian gibbon), Sumatran orangutan, Bornean orangutan, gorilla, bonobo and chimpanzee. Areas of their ...

When did our ancestors go from walking on all fours to just two? It’s a question that researchers have been trying to answer for a century. Last week, a Tacoma Community College anthropology professor ...

WASHINGTON – A nearly 13 million-year-old ape discovered in Spain is the last probable common ancestor to all living humans and great apes, a research team says in today’s issue of Science magazine. A ...