We might have misunderstood one of the greatest mysteries of human evolution. For decades, its been unclear why we began walking on two legs instead of moving on all fours as it is assumed our great ape ancestors did. But new evidence suggests the first great apes may have moved on two legs a little like we do. Image: Vector Open Stock
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The jaws of an ancient European ape might speak volumes about the origins of our ancestors. A new analysis of these fossils supports a controversial idea: that the apes which gave rise to humans evolved in south-east Europe instead of Africa. Image: David R Begun
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The 21st century has so far been a golden age of hominin discovery. New species like the 7-million-year-old Sahelanthropus tchadensis and the 300,000-year-old Homo naledi have added to our understanding of humanity’s past. And the finds will keep coming. Image: James St. John
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Some of our ancestors are known only by the merest fossils – a toe bone here, a jaw fragment there. In those cases, it’s all we have to build the story of human evolution. But with spectacular recent finds such as Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi, that story is starting to be rewritten in ways we never imagined. Image: James St. John
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Over the past 15 years, almost every part of our story, every assumption about who our ancestors were and where we came from, has been called into question. The new insights have some unsettling implications for how long we have walked the earth, and even who we really are. Image: Ryan Somma
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The skull of an ape-like Australopithecus found in 1924 and nicknamed the Taung Child revolutionised our view of human origins. It suggested humans evolved in Africa, not Eurasia as previously thought. No other hominin fossils have been found at the site since. But now a fossilised bee’s nest provides an insight into the local habitat in which that early human lived almost 3 million years ago – and hints that more fossils could be waiting to be discovered. Image: scead
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The diminutive human hobbits of Flores had a basement. And early signs hint at the tantalising possibility of more Homo floresiensis bones in this newly discovered chamber. Image: Bryn Pinzgauer
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For a century, palaeoanthropologists have generally learned to make do with slim pickings – part of a face here, a jawbone fragment there. Now, from the depths of a cave in South Africa, has come a monster cache of hominin bones from a previously unknown early species of our own genus, Homo. Image: John Hawks/Wits University
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It’s the coldest of cold cases: a forensic analysis suggests that an ancient human who lived 430,000 years ago died as the result of a deliberate attack by a right-handed assailant armed with a spear or hand axe. The crime is the earliest evidence of human-on-human violence in the fossil record. Image: 2015 Sala et al.
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Nearly 80 years ago, Dutch anthropologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald discovered a giant human-like tooth in a drug store in Hong Kong, and named the animal it came from Gigantopithecus. Since then, thousands more large teeth and three jawbones have come to light – but why the largest known ape went extinct remains unclear. Image: Tim Evanson
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Call it prehistoric string theory. The earliest evidence of string has been found – apparently created by our Neanderthal cousins. Perishable materials usually rot away, so the oldest string on record only dates back 30,000 years. The new string, preserved as 0.7-millimetre-long twisted plant fibres, are three times as old. Image: oui-ennui
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The human evolutionary tree is looking more tangled than ever: as many as six species of human-like apes were around during the crucial period from 2.5 to 1.8 million years ago when the first upright apes with relatively large brains evolved – and the one that gave rise to modern humans may have lived not in East Africa but in the south. Image: Lee Berger
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