Anthony Pagano, a medical researcher at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, has a new explanation for the Neanderthal extinction. He thinks the ancient humans might have been unusually prone to severe ear infections, which left them struggling to compete against their Homo sapiens cousins. Image: activefree
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More than half a billion years ago, a strange, worm-like creature died as it crawled across the muddy sea floor. Both the organism and the trail it left lay undisturbed for so long that they fossilized. Now, they are helping to revise our understanding of when and how animals evolved. Image: Dr. Zhe Chen at Nanjing Institute of Geology and Paleontology
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An ancient face is shedding new light on our earliest ancestors. Archaeologists have discovered a 3.8-million-year-old hominin skull in Ethiopia — a rare and remarkably complete specimen that could change what we know about the origins of one of humanity’s most famous ancestors, Lucy. Image: Dale Omori, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History
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How did birds get their feathers? Complex feathers might have originally evolved because birds’ dinosaur ancestors found them sexually attractive. Image: Eyesplash
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Did cooking make us human? New evidence from Kenya suggests early hominins were roasting meat over fires 1.5 million years ago. The discovery pushes back evidence of fire use by hundreds of thousands of years, and lends weight to the idea that cooked food helped trigger the evolution of big-brained humans. Image: brennacade
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