Anthropology

The 3.2-million-year-old human ancestor known as Lucy rose to fame through an incredible combination of circumstances

What can singing tell us about how we’re wired—and how our ancestors evolved?

A survey of the Dolmen of Menga suggests that the stone tomb’s Neolithic builders had an understanding of science

A tiny human relative called the hobbit, or Homo floresiensis, may have evolved from a larger ancestor that shrunk upon arriving on the Indonesian island of Flores, a new fossil suggests

Popcorn might be more than 6,000 years old, an anthropologist explains

The skeletons of scribes from ancient Egypt show deterioration from sitting and kneeling

Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old fossilized hominin, may have been much less hairy than we imagine—a perhaps shocking revelation for our modern sense of nakedness

The advent of “cumulative culture”—teaching others and passing down that knowledge—may have reached an inflection point around the time Neandertals and modern humans split from a common ancestor

Three factors determine whether a society experiences disease outbreaks—and how we can fight them

Is China’s future population drop a crisis or an opportunity?

Fossils and stone tools show that a cave in Saudi Arabia has been used as shelter by humans for millennia, up to the present day

Ancient prophecies of worlds destroyed by fire are becoming realities. How will we respond?