The five kilometres of passages and chambers in the Sterkfontein Cave system northwest of Johannesburg, South Africa, have yielded about 800 Australopithecus specimens in the past 90 years. They are ...

The high-security fossil vault at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg, contains treasure more precious than the gold that paid for the university’s establishment. It is the ...

Fossils found at the Sterkfontein Caves in South Africa reveal nearly four million years of hominin and environmental evolution. The Sterkfontein Cave has become famous for the hundreds of ...

The ape-like human ancestor Australopithecus—perhaps best known from the iconic fossil ‘Lucy’—might not have had much meat on its menu. After examining more than 3.3-million-year-old remains from ...

The species Australopithecus afarensis inhabited East Africa more than three million years ago, and occupies a key position in the hominin family tree, as it is widely accepted to be ancestral to all ...

Spinal bones of an extinct human relative have been found in lumps of rock blasted out of a South African cave and used to reconstruct one of the most complete back fossils of any hominin. The spine ...

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A fossilized foot found in the dusty sediments of northern Ethiopia has reopened one of paleoanthropology’s most ...

Fossils of our earliest ancestors in the "cradle of humankind" are a million years older than previously thought, according to new research. The Sterkfontein Caves in Johannesburg, South Africa, ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

Scott A. Williams received funding from The Leakey Foundation. Around two million years ago an ancient human relative, Australopithecus sediba, lived in what is today South Africa, nearby a cave ...