Paleoanthropology

Paleontologists in South Africa said on June 5 they have found the oldest known burial site in the world, containing remains of a small-brained distant relative of humans previously thought incapable of complex behavior.

A jawbone fragment discovered in northern Spain last month could be the oldest known fossil of a human ancestor found to date in Europe, Spanish paleontologists said on July 8.

The researchers said the fossil found at an archaeological site on June 30 in northern Spain's Atapuerca mountain range is around 1.4 million years old.

The fossils of our earliest ancestors found in South Africa are a million years older than previously thought, meaning they walked the Earth around the same time as their East African relatives like the famous "Lucy," according to new research.

Prehistoric footprints that have puzzled scientists since the 1970s are getting a second look: Were they left by extinct animals or by human ancestors?

When famed paleontologist Mary Leakey first uncovered the footprints in Tanzania 40 years ago, the evidence was ambiguous.

About 15% of these “super-archaic” regions may have been passed down to modern humans

Scientists say they've identified the earliest known sign of our species outside Africa. It's a chunk of skull recovered from a cave in southern Greece.
The fossil's estimated age is at least 210,000 years. Researchers said Wednesday that it shows our species began leaving Africa much earlier than previously thought.

Human-like footprints have been found stamped into an ancient sea shore fossilised beneath the Mediterranean island of Crete.
They shouldn’t be there.
Testing puts the rock’s age at 5.7 million years.
That’s a time when palaeontologists believe our human ancestors had only apelike feet.
And they lived in Africa.

A team of excavators in Bulgaria has resumed a search for fossils of an ape-like creature which may be the oldest-known direct ancestor of man and whose discovery has challenged the central hypothesis that humankind originated in Africa.

Neanderthals may not have been as lucky as our human ancestors in the long run, but that doesn’t mean the two subspecies didn’t get lucky.

A 430,000-year-old case may be the world's oldest murder mystery, NBC news has reported.