More than 40,000 years ago, Ice Age humans were carving repeated patterns of dots, lines, and crosses into tools and small ivory figurines. A new computational study of more than 3,000 of these ...

Researchers have identified a "tipping point" about 2.7 million years ago when global climate conditions switched from being ...

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 ...

A study confirms that Homo erectus, the direct ancestor of modern humans, arrived hundreds of thousands of years earlier than ...

Archaeology and paleontology are filled with discoveries that solve one mystery while creating several more. One of the most puzzling finds involved ancient human remains discovered inside a cave ...

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 ...

When a villager in northern Greece broke into a limestone wall and exposed a human skull, he did not just find a fossil, he ...

Digital reconstruction of a crushed skull from an ancient human relative could rewrite the timeline of human evolution, researchers said. A cranium dubbed Yunxian 2 was found in the Yunxian region of ...

New research along Turkey’s Ayvalık coast reveals a once-submerged land bridge that may have helped early humans cross from Anatolia into Europe. Archaeologists uncovered 138 Paleolithic tools across ...

The main sources of ignition before humans appeared were lightning strikes. Our evidence of fire in the fossil record (in deep time, as we often refer to the long geological stretch of time before ...