Background Until recently, the evolution of the genus Homo has been interpreted in the
context of the onset of African aridity and the expansion of open grasslands. Homo erectus …

Our view of H. erectus is vastly different today than when Pithecanthropus erectus was
described in 1894. Since its synonimization into Homo, views of the species and its …

Homo naledi is a previously-unknown species of extinct hominin discovered within the
Dinaledi Chamber of the Rising Star cave system, Cradle of Humankind, South Africa. This …

The site of Dmanisi, Georgia, has yielded an impressive sample of hominid cranial and
postcranial remains, documenting the presence of Homo outside Africa around 1.8 million …

Our understanding of the origin of the genus Homo has been hampered by a limited fossil
record in eastern Africa between 2.0 and 3.0 million years ago (Ma). Here we report the …

Despite a rich African Plio-Pleistocene hominin fossil record, the ancestry of Homo and its
relation to earlier australopithecines remain unresolved. Here we report on two partial …

The search for the earliest fossil evidence of the human lineage has been concentrated in
East Africa. Here we report the discovery of six hominid specimens from Chad, central Africa …

Cooking is a human universal that must have had widespread effects on the nutrition,
ecology, and social relationships of the species that invented it. The location and timing of its …

The relationship between climatic change and human evolution can be framed in terms of
three major hypotheses. A modern version of the long-held savanna hypothesis posits that …

Most interpretations of early hominin phylogeny recognize a single early to middle Pliocene
ancestral lineage, best represented by Australopithecus afarensis, which gave rise to a …