They drew with crayons, possibly fed on maggots and maybe even kissed us: Forty millenniums later, our ancient human cousins ...

Every time you look in the mirror, you are seeing the legacy of an extinct cousin. A small but influential fraction of your ...

Neanderthals and Homo sapiens repeatedly interbred, shared genes, and merged populations over the course of nearly 250,000 years. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), this intermingling of ...

In a time long before cities, farms, or even written words, early humans across the Levant were already shaping a complex story of connection, identity, and cultural exchange. Between 130,000 and ...

Neanderthals have long been the subject of intense scientific debate. This is largely because we still lack clear answers to some of the big questions about their existence and supposed disappearance.

But some Neanderthal DNA helped modern humans survive and reproduce, and thus it has lingered in our genomes. Nowadays, ...

In a rocky outcrop on Mount Carmel, in what is now Israel, a group of ancient humans buried their dead about 140,000 years ago. Scientists uncovered the site, called Skhul Cave, in 1928, and about ...

Whenever science has to defend itself from the skeptics, it tends to fall back on medical or other technological achievements that have improved our lives—such as the personal vehicle, solar energy, ...

Art is often held up as the most “human” of human endeavors. For millennia, philosophers, historians, and archaeologists have used art and symbolic thinking as behavioral indices for what makes humans ...

Some of their skeletal features resembled those of Homo sapiens, while others were more Neanderthal-like, making the species difficult to classify. The first skeleton discovered at the Skhul burial ...