Walking on two legs has long been considered a milestone in human evolution and one of our most defining characteristics.

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to unravel in 2025. Analysis of DNA extracted from the fossil electrified the ...

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 ...

Smithsonian paleoanthropologists explore how the year brought us closer to understanding ancient human relatives and origins Ryan McRae and Briana Pobiner A young chimpanzee looks on during an outing ...

For a long time, evolutionary biologists have thought that the genetic mutations that drive the evolution of genes and proteins are largely neutral: they're neither good nor bad, but just ordinary ...