Human

Archaeologists have found ancient tools at a dig site in Mongolia, indicating that humans were on the scene about 45,000 years ago, which is much earlier than current evidence suggests. There’s also a chance that the site is one spot where our ancestors mingled with the mysterious Denisovans.

Cardiovascular diseases are the number one killer in the world – and we might have a two million year old ancestor to blame. A team pinpointed a single gene that ancient ancestors lost, which appears to have predisposed us as a species towards higher rates of atherosclerosis than other apes.

The human genome can tell us where we’ve come from, and it’s hiding more than a few surprises. Now researchers from the University of Adelaide have found evidence of two unknown, archaic human species in modern DNA.

Fossilized human skulls found in a cave in Greece may force a rewrite of the human migration timeline yet again. Archaeologists have dated one of the skulls to about 210,000 years old – roughly 150,000 years older than the previous record-holder for earliest modern human remains in Europe.

While exploring the “dark heart” of the human genome, geneticists have now found some of the most ancient pieces of DNA, inherited from Neanderthals and an as-yet-unknown human relative, which may be affecting our sense of smell to this day.

It’s not known exactly when humans and Neanderthals split off from their last common ancestor, but the estimated window is very wide, between 300,000 and 800,000 years ago. Now a new study has found evidence that this split took place towards the earlier end of that range, or even longer ago still.

A fossilized jawbone discovered on the Tibetan Plateau has been found to belong to a Denisovan, an enigmatic early human species closely related to Neanderthals. Its age suggests that Denisovans were the first hominins to occupy the area, long before the arrival of modern humans.

One of the most important transitions in human history was when we stopped hunting and gathering for food and settled down to become farmers. Now, to reconstruct the history of one particular archaeological site in Turkey, scientists have examined the salts left behind from human and animal pee.

A new species of human has been discovered in a cave in the Philippines. Named Homo luzonensis after the island of Luzon where it was found, the hominin appears to have lived over 50,000 years ago, painting a more complete picture of human evolution.

It’s currently believed that Aboriginal ancestors made their way to Australia as long as 65,000 years ago, but new evidence may push the timeline back much further. If the Moyjil site does turn out to be human-made, it suggests that people have been living in Australia for as long as 120,000 years.

A new study is adding weight to the hypothesis that Alzheimer's disease is somewhat transmissible, providing experimental evidence that in the past amyloid beta plaques may have been seeded in a patient's brain through contaminated samples of human growth hormone.

Early hominins were known to have cross-bred when they crossed paths, and now the most direct evidence of those meetings has been found. By sequencing the genome of a hominin bone from a Siberian cave, anthropologists have discovered the direct descendant of a Neanderthal and a Denisovan.