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 ...

A rock sitting quietly in a university lab turned out to contain something far more remarkable than anyone realized: what may ...

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 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 ...

Humans were isolated in southern Africa for about 100,000 years, which caused them to "fall outside the range of genetic variation" seen in modern-day people, a new genetic study reveals. The finding ...

Scientists have digitally reconstructed the face of a 1.5-million-year-old Homo erectus fossil from Ethiopia, uncovering an unexpectedly primitive appearance. While its braincase fits with classic ...

The risk of malaria influenced where prehistoric people lived in sub-Saharan Africa, a new study suggests. The research is the first to link early human habitation with the deadly disease and ...

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 ...

In paleoanthropology, the recent African origin of modern humans, also called the "Out of Africa" theory (OOA), recent single-origin hypothesis (RSOH), replacement hypothesis, or recent African origin ...