The oldest distinguishing feature between humans and our ape cousins is our ability to walk on two legs – a trait known as bipedalism. Among mammals, only humans and our ancestors perform this ...

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 ...

New fossil discoveries in eastern Africa offer a rare glimpse of one of the oldest members of humanity’s evolutionary family. More than 4 million years ago, this upright-walking hominid—dubbed ...

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 ...

July 18—The discovery of fossil remains of a hominid that lived in what is now Ethiopia between 5.2 and 5.8 million years ago are the subject of two articles in the July 12 issue of Nature. Hominid ...

Figuring out the story of human origins is like assembling a huge, complicated jigsaw puzzle that has lost most of its pieces. Many will never be found, and those that do turn up are sometimes hard to ...

New-found fossils have fueled controversy surrounding the earliest days of our hominid ancestors, and those of chimpanzees, our closest living relatives in the animal kingdom. Chimpanzees' and humans' ...