Search Results: Neanderthal

Neanderthals are an extinct group of fossil humans that appeared in Western Eurasia in the mid-Middle Pleistocene and shared the stage with the first modern humans arriving in Europe from around 45,000 years ago, before disappearing from...

In May 2010, after years of intense discussions surrounding possible fossils of mixed Homo sapiens and Neanderthal descent floating around the scientific community, a team led by Svante Pääbo of the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology...

The Denisovans are an extinct group of fossil humans who, along with their sister group the Neanderthals, also share an ancestor with Homo sapiens. Thus far, they are known only from Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains in Siberia, where...

Disregarding the extremely inhospitable spots even the most stubborn of us have enough common sense to avoid, humans have managed to cover an extraordinary amount of territory on this earth. Go back 200,000 years, however, and Homo sapiens...

Homo heidelbergensis is an extinct species of human that is identified in both Africa and western Eurasia from roughly 700,000 years ago onwards until around 200,000 years ago – fitting snugly within the Middle Pleistocene. Named for a piece...

Homo sapiens ('wise man'), or modern humans, are the only species of human still around today. Despite having invented countless ways of labelling the world around us, we have so far done a surprisingly poor job at defining ourselves. Originating...

An ice age is a period in which the earth's climate is colder than normal, with ice sheets capping the poles and glaciers dominating higher altitudes. Within an ice age, there are varying pulses of colder and warmer climatic conditions, known...

Homo naledi is an extinct species of human discovered in Rising Star Cave in South Africa in 2013 CE in what has become the biggest single-species hominin find in Africa to this day, which is moreover set to cause a bit of an avalanche within...

Homo floresiensis, nicknamed 'hobbit' because it only stood about 1 meter tall, is an extinct species of fossil human that lived on the island of Flores, Indonesia during the Pleistocene. Floresiensis is still shrouded in a fair bit of mystery...

The Palaeolithic ('Old Stone Age') makes up the earliest chunk of the Stone Age – the large swathe of time during which hominins used stone to make tools – and ranges from the first known tool use roughly 2,6 million years ago to the end...