Their DNA survives in diverse populations – but who were the Denisovans?
Who were the Denisovans, where did they live, and why are they important to the story of humanity?
Fossilized footprints reveal two extinct hominin species living side by side 1.5 million years ago
New research reveals fossil footprints that record two different species of hominins walking along the same Kenyan lakeshore at the same time, roughly 1.5 million years ago.
Music, food, and family podcasts
Looking for a new podcast? Executive Director Sharal Camisa Smith recommends Origin Stories episodes on music, food, and family dynamics.
Lucy, the iconic ancestor
Fifty years since the discovery of Lucy, what does this iconic fossil tell us about our evolutionary story? By Evan HadinghamAuthor of Discovering Us What marked out our ancestors from other early apes and set them on the evolutionary path to becoming Homo sapiens? At the start of the 20th century, many assumed that intelligence and a big brain were
Lucy, discovered 50 years ago in Ethiopia, stood just 3.5 feet tall − but she still towers over our understanding of human origins
In 1974, on a survey in Hadar in the remote badlands of Ethiopia, paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and graduate student Tom Gray found a piece of an elbow joint jutting from the dirt in a gully. It proved to be the first of 47 bones of a single individual – an early human ancestor whom Johanson nicknamed “Lucy.”