A group of early Homo sapiens crossed into Arabia more than 100,000 years ago, long before the migration that shaped modern populations. Their presence was brief. Archaeological evidence shows they ...

The first humans to use fire probably didn’t start it themselves. They may have simply stolen it from the landscape, probably after lightning or seasonal wildfires. In a South African cave, ...

The textbook version of the "Out of Africa" hypothesis holds that the first human species to leave the continent around 1.8 million years ago was Homo erectus. But in recent years, a debate has ...

The fossil and genetic evidence agree that modern humans originated in Africa. The most genetically diverse human populations—the groups that have had the longest time to pick up novel mutations—live ...

The continent of Africa is recognized as the place where humankind originated and evolved over millennia. From famous ancestors like Lucy, the Australopithecus afarensis remains unearthed in Ethiopia ...

In southern Africa, a group of people lived in partial isolation for hundreds of thousands of years. This is shown in a new study based on analyses of the genomes of 28 people who lived between 10,200 ...

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. The great out-of-Africa migration is one of the canonical ...