Africa has long been known as the cradle of humanity. Fossils, tools and genetics all point there. Yet the deeper story of how the first modern humans lived, moved and mixed has stayed blurry. Too ...

Ancient bones buried deep in African soil are rewriting what we thought we knew about our shared human story. New genetic breakthroughs are finally pulling back the curtain on migrations and “ghost ...

In a cave overlooking the ocean on the southern coast of South Africa, archaeologists discovered thousands of stone tools, created by ancient humans roughly 20,000 years ago. By examining tiny details ...

Important, previously unrecognized genetic changes common to all ancient and modern Homo sapiens spread in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, a new study finds. After that, the same investigation ...

Sequencing of 7,000-year-old human genomes from when the Sahara Desert was green suggest that pastoralism spread through cultural exchange, not large-scale migration. Gazing at an image of the vast, ...

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 ...

Mandible of a hunter-gatherer woman who lived 7900 years ago at Matjes River Rockshelter in the Western Cape, South Africa, for whom a genome was reconstructed. In one of the largest African ...

Thousands of years before Odysseus crossed the ‘wine-dark sea’ in Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, hunter-gatherers might have island-hopped their way to Africa across the Mediterranean. The first ...