Archaeology

"Hugging" creature from Brazil shakes up picture of snake evolution

The remains of a preserved 50-million-year-old cell may provide clues to the evolution of earthworms and leeches

Ancient coastal dwellers made tracks just below the tide line of an island off British Columbia, but the big question is when

“Kennewick Man” sequencing points to Native American ancestry

In an excerpt from his new book Ian Tattersall lays out the story of how a scientific giant in the field of evolution put forth a spectacularly incorrect theory about the diversity of hominids

Researchers have found what appear to be collagen fibers and blood cells in unremarkable-looking fossils

Hint: it took chain saws, feathers and lots of latex, says vertebrate palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Brusatte

Fragments of edible marine snail shells found in Lebanon support the idea that ancient humans went from Africa to Europe through the Levant. Cynthia Graber reports

Skull fragments dating back 430,000 years appear to be those of the world's first known murder victim, based on the damage observed. Dina Maron reports

The Australopithecine lived about 3.4 million years ago in what is now Ethiopia, around the same time as Australopithecus afarensis

In 1994 researchers made a mummy. Now scientists have reverse engineered the process to figure out how it's done, with the mummy makers still around to tell them how they did. Cynthia Graber reports

Factors that drove the evolution of our intellectual capacity are also implicated in the memory disorder