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17 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: October 25, 2026.
Proteins pulled from skull and jaw fragments found in northern China in the 1970s identify the Xujiayao remains as Denisovan, hinting the lineage was widespread across East Asia.
A round hole in a shoulder blade from Iraq's Shanidar Cave points to a thrust through the chest, and a split tooth shows the same person had been cared for earlier.
A team rebuilt the Jebel Irhoud skull from fossil fragments using mostly open-source software. His estimated brain size falls well within the range of men alive today.
A UCLA and University at Buffalo team traced selection on the AMY1 gene back roughly 10,000 years, to the moment Andean highlanders started growing potatoes — and measured the advantage at 1.24 percent per generation.
A new method called TRACE detected a "ghost" lineage that split from us 800,000 years ago and left about 1% of the modern genome, plus a second, far older population inherited through the Denisovans.
At a cave in southern Türkiye, both human groups selectively gathered marine shells with no food value for more than 20,000 years — a sign, researchers say, of shared symbolic behavior.
A new analysis of bones from an Indonesian cave suggests Homo floresiensis neither hunted big game nor controlled fire, deepening the mystery of its origins.
Genomes from across Oceania reveal that interbreeding with at least three Denisovan groups left gene variants that still shape how people fight infection today.
New burial-dating of three crania from the Yunxian site puts them at 1.77 million years old — the oldest securely dated human-relative fossils ever found in eastern Asia.
A study of more than 500 teeth from 27 wild primate species finds the same telltale grooves in apes that never use tools — undercutting a century-old assumption about early human behavior.
Carefully carved artifacts from an ancient Greek lakeside reveal that early humans possessed far more sophisticated woodworking skills than previously believed.
Ancient artifacts from Greece reveal early humans were far more skilled and resourceful than previously believed.
Thirteen teeth excavated from Ethiopia's Ledi-Geraru badlands reveal that the earliest humans co-existed with a previously unnamed small-bodied Australopithecus, overturning the textbook image of a single linear march from ape to human and reshaping the early Homo family tree.
Genetic research challenges single-population theory, showing early humans evolved from multiple intermingling groups across Africa over hundreds of thousands of years.
First research from Tinshemet Cave shows early human groups shared technology, burial practices, and cultural innovations in unprecedented detail.
First-ever research from Israel's Tinshemet Cave reveals active cooperation between species, challenging long-held views about early human relationships.
A new species named Masripithecus moghraensis is the closest known relative to the ancestor of all living apes and humans — and its location in northern Africa suggests scientists have been looking in the wrong region for decades.