NEARLY twenty years have gone since Eugene Dubois, then a young surgeon attached to the Dutch forces in Java, and now professor of geology in the University of Amsterdam, discovered that remarkable ...

Pithecanthropus erectus, the 500,000-year-old Java ape-man and first of humanoid typediscovered, whose thighbone, skull-top, and grinding teeth are in the private possession of Dr. Eugen Dubois, of ...

ON p. 20 of this issue of NATURE there appears a letter on the recently found Ngandong skull, from Prof. E. Dubois, whose discovery of Pithecanthropus erectus and close association with ...

There were giants in the earth in those days.—Genesis, VI, 4. Genesis and many a folk tale notwithstanding, most anthropologists have pictured primitive man as a little fellow somewhere between an ape ...

We are at a critical time and supporting climate journalism is more important than ever. Science News and our parent organization, the Society for Science, need your help to strengthen environmental ...

Homo erectus emerged around 2 million years ago and survived until roughly 117,000 to 108,000 years ago, making it one of the longest-lived and most influential human species. Kayleigh covers its ...

For millennia, humans have told stories about stealing fire from the gods. In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus gifts fire to humanity after sneaking it away from the gods’ home on Mount Olympus.

A new study, published July 6, 2026, in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that two of the best-known trends in human evolution—brain growth and the reduction in the size of the face and ...

While doing fieldwork on Indonesia’s Flores Island in the early 2000s, anthropologist Gregory Forth, PhD, frequently spoke to the locals living in the mountains. They told him that they sometimes ...

Homo ergaster ("working man") is an extinct hominid species (or subspecies, according to some authorities) which lived throughout eastern and southern Africa between 1.9 to 1.4 million years ago with ...

Learn how fossils show human ancestors did not grow bigger in a straight line, but split into larger and smaller evolutionary paths. Early relatives such as Australopithecus weighed around 88 pounds ...