One of the 20th-century's biggest quests was to find the “missing link,” a being who connected humans to their pre-historic ...

The oldest stone tools ever discovered were unearthed in Kenya by a group of scientists at the Lomekwi 3 site. The stone ...

Their dream came spectacularly true on that momentous day in 1974. The Lucy fossil preserved skull fragments and a lower jaw ...

An analysis by Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, Germany, on the manual capabilities of early hominins reveals that some ...

Vaccines delivered through a puff up the nose or into the mouth could be even more effective than shots at protecting people ...

Until now, anthropologists had assumed that these long-extinct creatures lacked the right hand shape for such complex tasks, ...

Subsequent discoveries of Australopithecus afarensis and associated fauna appeared to corroborate this hypothesis. However, the ecological contexts of the earliest hominins suggest that the link ...

After all, the region had also been home to several earlier members of our family tree, including celebrity fossil Lucy (the most famous example of Australopithecus afarensis, which lived around three ...

As the University of Boston anthropologist explains, the fossil "Lucy" (Australopithecus afarensis) had a more difficult birth process than A. sediba, in terms of a tighter fit between the foetus ...

Australopithecus afarensis. “We knew that because it was so complete it was important, but I didn’t realise it would actually launch a new species,” says Johanson. Lucy’s anatomy provided ...

afarensis is Lucy herself ... Then came more than two million years of Australopithecus—still small-brained but fully bipedal, no longer restricted to woodlands, and with a geographic range ...

Other remarkable fossils of Lucy's species, Australopithecus afarensis, were later unearthed at other sites. Together, they offer a picture of one of our earliest human ancestors. Learn how ...