The oldest distinguishing feature between humans and our ape cousins is our ability to walk on two legs—a trait known as bipedalism. Among mammals, only humans and our ancestors perform this atypical ...

This release is available in Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese and Amharic. In a special issue of Science, an international team of scientists has for the first time thoroughly described Ardipithecus ...

CHAMPAIGN, lll. – Among the many surprises associated with the discovery of the oldest known, nearly complete skeleton of a hominid is the finding that this species took its first steps toward ...

A new method to estimate sexual dimorphism in fossil species near the base of our family tree has been just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), through the joint ...

Lucy, that starlet among ancient human relatives, may have shared the stage with a hominin very different from herself, a newly found fossil suggests. Out of the Ethiopian desert, researchers have ...

The skeleton of Ardipithecus ramidus, an ancient fossil dubbed "Ardi," is radically changing our ideas about mankind's origins. Kent State University's C. Owen Lovejoy says Ardi shows our ancestors ...

A series of new fossil discoveries in the 1990s generated great interest among scientists involved in research into human origins, pushing the date for the beginnings of bipedalism back to more than 4 ...

Paleontologists searching the bleak desert of central Ethiopia have unearthed the fossilized bones of a 5.5 million-year-old creature that appears to be the oldest human ancestor yet discovered. The ...

Ardipithecus ramidus, a four million year old ancestor of humans, was so important that it was declared the biggest scientific breakthrough of 2009. That might still be true – but we might also be ...