(Reuters) - The incorporation of meat into the diet was a milestone for the human evolutionary lineage, a potential catalyst for advances such as increased brain size. But scientists have struggled to ...

A nearly complete skeleton from South Africa’s Sterkfontein Caves, known as Little Foot, may represent a distinct branch of ...

Little Foot's face looks like it has been through a slow-motion car crash, because it has. For millions of years, rock pressure and shifting sediments pushed and twisted the fossil's facial bones ...

The fossils of our earliest ancestors found in South Africa are a million years older than previously thought, meaning they walked the Earth around the same time as their East African relatives like ...

The finding also applies to Australopithecus africanus, a closely related species from southern Africa. But the two species did not share the same degree of difference. That gap between them, ...

We celebrate the centenary of Nature’s announcement of the discovery of the Taung child, Australopithecus africanus, a discovery that confirmed Africa as humanity’s cradle and revolutionised our ...

One hundred years ago, the discovery of a skull in South Africa's North West province altered our understanding of human evolution. The juvenile skull was dubbed the Taung Child by Raymond Dart, an ...

Australopithecus afarensis© "Australopithecus afarensis" by Rod Waddington is licensed under BY-SA 2.0. Natural history is a difficult thing to conceptualize. You've got eons of undocumented progress, ...

The high-security fossil vault at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg, contains treasure more precious than the gold that paid for the university’s establishment. It is the ...

When this 3-year-old child's skull was found in 1924, it was among the first early human fossils to be found in Africa -- and the first early human fossil discovery to draw major attention to this ...

South Africa’s Pleistocene sites rank among the most important in the world for the study of human origins. Concentrated mainly in the Gauteng region within the UNESCO-listed Cradle of Humankind, they ...