When we think of lead poisoning, most of us imagine modern human-made pollution, paint, old pipes, or exhaust fumes.

For decades, Paranthropus boisei, an early hominin that roamed eastern Africa a million years ago, was known for its gigantic ...

Lead poisoning isn’t just an industrial-age problem. A new study reveals our ancestors, including Neanderthals, were exposed ...

After comparing shapes, depths, and pressure patterns, this study found that two different hominin species left footprints in ...

Lead exposure may have spelled evolutionary success for humans—and extinction for our ancient cousins—but other scientists ...

Lead exposure sounds like a modern problem, at least if you define “modern” the way a paleoanthropologist might: a time that ...

“The hand shows it could form precision grips similar to ours, while also retaining powerful grasping capabilities more like ...

Human activity may be triggering the greatest extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, according to scientists. Their study, based on a review of decades of research on ...

In a 1970 National Geographic feature, paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey—son of Louis and Mary Leakey—recounted his ...

At Rome’s Casal Lumbroso site, humans 400,000 years ago turned a dead elephant into food and tools—proof of astonishing ...

The first fossil hominins were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century in South Africa, just over half a century ...

The first fossil hominins were discovered at the beginning of the 20th century in South Africa, just over half a century after the publication of Darwin’s milestone work The Origin of Species ...