One spring, after a long winter, an aged elephant lay dying at the bank of a small stream near the coast of what is now northern Italy. Soon after, some scavengers arrived to dine on this huge ...

A new study suggests early humans were using fire in South Africa’s Wonderwerk Cave as far back as 1.79 million years ago. Researchers found burned bones deep inside the cave, where natural wildfires ...

What did early humans like to eat? The answer, according to a team of archaeologists in Argentina, is extinct megafauna, such as giant sloths and giant armadillos. In a study published in the journal ...

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 ...

Homo habilis was thought to be the first hominin to use stone tools for hunting and processing meat, but they might have been prey instead of predators. If H. habilis really had begun the shift ...

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 ...

“Experts have long debated the date that humans arrived in Australia,” said LiveScience. Now a study using DNA from both ancient and modern Aboriginal people across Oceania may have finally “settled ...

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 ...

Modern humans who lived close to the equator were found to be more likely to be able to digest bugs, but this ability ...

Long before humans spread across the globe, a deadly disease may have quietly shaped where our ancestors lived—and even how we evolved. New research reveals that malaria didn’t just threaten early ...