The ape-like human ancestor Australopithecus—perhaps best known from the iconic fossil ‘Lucy’—might not have had much meat on its menu. After examining more than 3.3-million-year-old ...

So how did we become such a unique animal? Human intelligence was born in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, as our ape ancestors evolved increasingly bigger brains. That may only have happened ...

Our immediate evolutionary family is comprised of the hominoids, the group of primates that includes the "lesser apes" (siamangs and gibbons) as well as the "great apes" (chimpanzees, bonobos ...

Mr. Holloway’s contrarian idea was that it wasn’t necessarily the big brains of humans that distinguished them from apes or primitive ancestors. Rather, it was the way human brains were organized.

hominins split from their closest African ape ancestors, the chimpanzees. Adapted to two-footed walking, early hominins dropped out of the trees and started to carry food and tools in their hands.

and to revisit the timing and rate of the expansions of these regions across different ape ancestors. Duplications can change gene expression by regulating the amount of gene product that is made ...