For the first time, scientists have successfully used ancient proteins to determine the sex of a 3.5-million-year-old hominin, marking a major breakthrough in paleoanthropology. The discovery was made ...

Australopithecus afarensis© "Australopithecus afarensis" by Rod Waddington is licensed under BY-SA 2.0. Natural history is a difficult thing to conceptualize. You’ve got eons of undocumented ...

Australopithecus prometheus or Australopithecus africanus? Though the question might sound simple, it isn't so straightforward for scientists, who have been stumped by the famous "Little Foot" fossil ...

Scientists say they have solved the mystery of the Burtele foot, a set of 3.4 million-year-old bones found in Ethiopia in 2009. The fossils, along with others unearthed more recently, have now been ...

These files consist of 3D scans of historical objects in the collections of the Smithsonian and may be downloaded by you only for non-commercial, educational, and ...

Little Foot’s face looks like it has been through a slow-motion car crash, because it has. For millions of years, rock pressure and shifting sediments pushed and twisted the fossil’s facial bones ...