https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. It is one of the strangest puzzles in human evolution. About 90% of people across every human culture favor their right hand—with no other primate species showing a population-level preference on this scale. Despite decades of research into the brains, genes and development behind handedness, why humans ended up so overwhelmingly right-handed has remained an evolutionary enigma. https://phys.org/news/2026-05-why-is-almost-everyone-right.html Evolution Fri, 15 May 2026 13:00:06 EDT news698068021 An international team of scientists, including the University of Wollongong (UOW), has found compelling evidence that a changing climate played a role in the extinction of the early human species Homo floresiensis, also known as "hobbits." Their research, published in Communications Earth & Environment, reveals the hobbits abandoned Liang Bua—a cave they had occupied for around 140,000 years—during a drought that lasted for thousands of years. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-severe-drought-linked-decline-hobbits.html Ecology Sat, 27 Dec 2025 09:50:01 EST news684423719 About 50,000 years ago, humanity lost one of its last surviving hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (also known as "the hobbit" thanks to its small stature). The cause of its disappearance, after more than a million years living on the isolated volcanic island of Flores, Indonesia, has been a longstanding mystery. https://phys.org/news/2025-12-hobbits-mysteriously-years-reveals-home.html Archaeology Mon, 08 Dec 2025 11:20:01 EST news684415042 Until Homo floresiensis was discovered, scientists assumed that the evolution of the human lineage was defined by bigger and bigger brains. Via a process called encephalization, human brains evolved to be relatively more massive than would be expected based on corresponding body size. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-hobbits-flores-evolved-small-growth.html Evolution Wed, 24 Sep 2025 14:32:04 EDT news677943121 Anthropologist Lee Berger and his team at the University of the Witwatersrand, working within the Rising Star cave system in South Africa, have published their most extensive evidence yet of deliberate burial by Homo naledi, a small brained hominin that walked the Earth with several current modern human cousins over 240,000 years ago. https://phys.org/news/2025-09-homo-naledi-evidence-intentional-burial.html Archaeology Wed, 10 Sep 2025 09:50:03 EDT news676716225 Findings made by Griffith University researchers show that early hominins made a major deep-sea crossing to reach the Indonesian island of Sulawesi much earlier than previously established, based on the discovery of stone tools dating to at least 1.04 million years ago at the Early Pleistocene (or "Ice Age") site of Calio. https://phys.org/news/2025-08-archaeologists-oldest-evidence-humans-hobbit.html Archaeology Wed, 06 Aug 2025 11:10:03 EDT news673604162 Researchers at La Trobe University, Australia, and the University of Utah, U.S., report that recent DNA findings challenge claims of a 65,000-year-old human arrival in Sahul—the ancient paleocontinent that existed during the Pleistocene ice age, made up of present-day Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea. https://phys.org/news/2025-07-genetic-evidence-early-colonization-timelines.html Archaeology Tue, 15 Jul 2025 06:30:01 EDT news671702766 The Sunda Shelf is home to a rich Pleistocene hominin fossil record, including specimens of Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis, Homo erectus, and archaic Homo. Much of the Sunda Shelf is submerged. At times during the Pleistocene, however, the shelf was exposed, forming the large landmass known as Sundaland. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-hominin-fossils-recovered-submerged-sundaland.html Archaeology Fri, 27 Jun 2025 11:42:10 EDT news670243322 The enamel that forms the outer layer of our teeth might seem like an unlikely place to find clues about evolution. But it tells us more than you'd think about the relationships between our fossil ancestors and relatives. https://phys.org/news/2025-06-million-year-pitted-teeth-ancient.html Evolution Mon, 09 Jun 2025 11:39:04 EDT news668687941 Paranthropus robustus was a species of prehistoric human that lived in South Africa about 2 million years ago, alongside Homo ergaster, a direct ancestor of modern people. Fossils of Paranthropus robustus are found in abundance at Swartkrans Cave, situated about halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria. Much has been revealed about the diet and social organization of this extinct species based on studies of its many skulls and hundreds of teeth, which have been recovered from Swartkrans since scientific excavations began there in 1948. https://phys.org/news/2025-03-fossil-discovery-early-human-ancestor.html Evolution Wed, 05 Mar 2025 09:55:03 EST news660390901 In pursuit of knowledge, the evolution of humanity ranks with the origins of life and the universe. And yet, except when an exciting find hits the headlines, paleoanthropology and its related fields have gained far less scientific support and funding—particularly for scientists and institutions based in the African countries where so many landmark discoveries have occurred. https://phys.org/news/2024-11-story-human-evolution-ancient-apes.html Evolution Mon, 25 Nov 2024 14:20:01 EST news651763555 The fastest animal on land is the cheetah, capable of reaching top speeds of 104 kilometers per hour. In the water, the fastest animals are yellowfin tuna and wahoo, which can reach speeds of 75 and 77 km per hour respectively. In the air, the title of the fastest level flight (excluding diving) goes to the white-throated needletail swift, at more than 112 km per hour. https://phys.org/news/2024-10-big-small-modern-humans-ideal.html Plants & Animals Sat, 02 Nov 2024 15:20:01 EDT news649592697 In the deep human past, highly skilled seafarers made daring crossings from Asia to the Pacific Islands. It was a migration of global importance that shaped the distribution of our species—Homo sapiens—across the planet. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-evidence-west-papua-fresh-clues.html Archaeology Tue, 13 Aug 2024 12:00:01 EDT news642769011 The discovery of a tiny arm bone suggests that an ancient human dubbed "hobbits" only shrank down to their diminutive size after they arrived on an Indonesian island a million years ago, scientists said on Tuesday. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-discovery-tiny-bone-mysterious-hobbit.html Paleontology & Fossils Sat, 10 Aug 2024 12:00:01 EDT news642164405 A paper appearing today in Nature Communications reports the discovery of extremely rare early human fossils from the Indonesian island of Flores, including an astonishingly small adult limb bone. https://phys.org/news/2024-08-smallest-arm-bone-human-fossil.html Evolution Tue, 06 Aug 2024 11:00:01 EDT news642090315 Competition between species played a major role in the rise and fall of hominins—and produced a "bizarre" evolutionary pattern for the Homo lineage—according to a new University of Cambridge study that revises the start and end dates for many of our early ancestors. https://phys.org/news/2024-04-interspecies-competition-bizarre-pattern-evolutionary.html Evolution Wed, 17 Apr 2024 11:48:03 EDT news632573281 Timing is crucial when it comes to understanding the origins of humanity. Developing better dating techniques to discover the ages of key fossils will help scientists to discover how Homo sapiens and our relatives evolved. https://phys.org/news/2023-12-fossil-dating-human-evolution.html Evolution Tue, 19 Dec 2023 10:42:04 EST news622204921 An extensive study, published in Communications Biology, sheds new light on the complex evolution of our feet. https://phys.org/news/2023-11-complex-evolution-human-feet.html Evolution Tue, 21 Nov 2023 12:12:06 EST news619791124 What does it mean to be human? https://phys.org/news/2023-09-science-picture-ancient-kinds-humans.html Archaeology Sun, 24 Sep 2023 05:28:22 EDT news614752093 When the first modern humans arose in East Africa sometime between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, the world was very different compared to today. Perhaps the biggest difference was that we—meaning people of our species, Homo sapiens—were only one of several types of humans (or hominins) that simultaneously existed on Earth. https://phys.org/news/2022-10-homo-sapiens-ancestors-world-neanderthals.html Molecular & Computational biology Mon, 10 Oct 2022 12:11:49 EDT news584622705 Char from ancient fires and stalagmites in caves hold clues to the mysterious disappearance of Neanderthals from Europe. https://phys.org/news/2022-09-archaeology-mysterious-demise-neanderthals.html Archaeology Mon, 26 Sep 2022 02:09:54 EDT news583376978 Although there has been evidence of our species living in rainforest regions in Southeast Asia from at least 70,000 years ago, the poor preservation of organic material in these regions limits how much we know about their diet and ecological adaptations to these habitats. An international team of scientists led by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz has now applied a new method to investigate the diet of fossil humans: The analysis of stable zinc isotopes from tooth enamel. This method proves particularly helpful to learn whether prehistoric humans and animals were primarily eating meat or plants. https://phys.org/news/2021-10-early-modern-human-southeast-asia.html Evolution Thu, 14 Oct 2021 16:43:57 EDT news553448633 If you've ever suffered from a sore jaw that popped or clicked when you chewed gum or crunched hard foods, you may be able to blame it on your extinct ancestors. https://phys.org/news/2021-08-hobbit-stress.html Paleontology & Fossils Mon, 23 Aug 2021 12:25:46 EDT news548940342 An international group of researchers led by the University of Adelaide has conducted a comprehensive genetic analysis and found no evidence of interbreeding between modern humans and the ancient humans known from fossil records in Island Southeast Asia. They did find further DNA evidence of our mysterious ancient cousins, the Denisovans, which could mean there are major discoveries to come in the region. https://phys.org/news/2021-03-evidence-mysterious-denisovans.html Evolution Tue, 23 Mar 2021 10:01:42 EDT news535712499 Nearly two decades ago, a small-bodied "human-like" fossil, Homo floresiensis, was discovered on an island in Indonesia. Some scientists have credited the find, now nicknamed "Hobbit," as representative of a human ancestor who developed dwarfed features after living on the island, while others suggest it represents a modern human suffering from some type of disease because of its distinct human-like face and small brain. https://phys.org/news/2020-12-timeline-human-evolution-island-fox.html Evolution Wed, 09 Dec 2020 16:00:13 EST news526752009 A new article published in Nature Communications applies stable isotope analysis to a collection of fossil human teeth from the islands of Timor and Alor in Wallacea to study the ecological adaptations of the earliest members of our species to reach this isolated part of the world. Because the Wallacean islands are considered extreme, resource poor settings, archaeologists believed that early seafaring populations would have moved rapidly through this region without establishing permanent communities. Nevertheless, this has so far been difficult to test. https://phys.org/news/2020-04-evidence-late-pleistocene-human-colonization.html Archaeology Wed, 29 Apr 2020 09:41:42 EDT news507372097 Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one. The Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, were stocky hunters adapted to Europe's cold steppes. The related Denisovans inhabited Asia, while the more primitive Homo erectus lived in Indonesia, and Homo rhodesiensis in central Africa. https://phys.org/news/2019-11-humans-victims-sixth-mass-extinction.html Archaeology Fri, 22 Nov 2019 08:53:21 EST news493635189 Human remains discovered on Alor island in Indonesia offer new insight into human migration through Southeast Asia thousands of years ago, say researchers from The Australian National University (ANU). https://phys.org/news/2019-08-small-skulls-human-migration-highway.html Archaeology Mon, 26 Aug 2019 08:29:07 EDT news486026933 The announcement of a new species of ancient human (more correctly hominin) from the Philippines, reported today in Nature, will cause a lot of head-shaking among anthropologists and archaeologists. https://phys.org/news/2019-04-evidence-declare-species-human.html Archaeology Thu, 11 Apr 2019 07:20:05 EDT news474185996 An international team of researchers have uncovered the remains of a new species of human in the Philippines, proving the region played a key role in hominin evolutionary history. https://phys.org/news/2019-04-species-early-human-philippines.html Archaeology Wed, 10 Apr 2019 13:00:03 EDT news474091186