For decades, textbooks painted a dramatic picture of early humans as tool-using hunters who rose quickly to the top of the food chain. The tale was that Homo habilis, one of the earliest ...

Long before cities or farms, the earliest humans were standing in a changing northern Kenyan landscape, striking stone to stone with steady hands. Their world was noisy with wind, heat, wildfires, and ...

Over millions of years, humans and their ancestors evolved alongside a host of terrifying predators—some so formidable, their bones still tell tales of ancient death matches. While today we view ...

Our prehistoric human ancestors relied on deliberately modified and sharpened stone tools as early as 3.3 million years ago. The selection of rock type depended on how easily the material could be ...

As early humans spread from lush African forests into grasslands, their need for ready sources of energy led them to develop a taste for grassy plants, especially grains and the starchy plant tissue ...

It's easy to take for granted that with the flick of a lighter or the turn of a furnace knob, modern humans can conjure flames — cooking food, lighting candles or warming homes. For much of our ...

For both dietary and environmental reasons, we’re rethinking our consumption of meat. But for earlier humans, meat consumption appeared to be a critical, yet somewhat poorly understood, contributor to ...

When a stone sits on the Earth’s surface, cosmic rays quietly pepper it, leaving behind rare isotopes like tiny time stamps. Bury the stone deep enough, and that cosmic “printing press” shuts off.

Early humans may have created fire 400,000 years ago, according to evidence unearthed at an archaeological site in England. Although there is evidence that early humans used natural fire in Africa as ...