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Categories: Anthropology: Early Humans, Offbeat: Paleontology and Archeology

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An exceptionally well-preserved collection of fossils discovered in eastern Yunnan Province, China, has enabled scientists to solve a centuries-old riddle in the evolution of life on earth, revealing what the first animals to make skeletons looked like.

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The use of ancient DNA, including samples of human remains around 45,000 years old, has shed light on a previously unknown aspect of human evolution.

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The first genetic data from Palaeolithic human individuals in the UK -- the oldest human DNA obtained from the British Isles so far -- indicates the presence of two distinct groups that migrated to Britain at the end of the last ice age, according to new research. Published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution, the new study by UCL Institute of Archaeology, the Natural History Museum and the Francis Crick Institute researchers reveals for the first time that the recolonisation of Britain consisted of at least two groups with distinct origins and cultures.

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Researchers have managed to sequence multiple individuals from a remote Neanderthal community in Siberia. Among these thirteen individuals, the researchers identified multiple related individuals -- among these a father and his teenage daughter. The researchers were also able to use the thirteen genomes to provide a glimpse into the social organization of a Neanderthal community. They appear to have been a small group of close relatives, consisting of ten to twenty members, and communities were primarily connected through female migration.

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Scientists have shown that in one in every 4,000 births, some of the genetic code from our mitochondria -- the 'batteries' that power our cells -- inserts itself into our DNA, revealing a surprising new insight into how humans evolve. Researchers show that mitochondrial DNA also appears in some cancer DNA, suggesting that it acts as a sticking plaster to try and repair damage to our genetic code.

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A trove of fossils in China, unearthed in rock dating back some 436 million years, have revealed for the first time that the mysterious galeaspids, a jawless freshwater fish, possessed paired fins.

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An international team has reconstructed the genome organization of the earliest common ancestor of all mammals. The reconstructed ancestral genome could help in understanding the evolution of mammals and in conservation of modern animals. The earliest mammal ancestor likely looked like the fossil animal 'Morganucodon' which lived about 200 million years ago.

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Interdisciplinary research in southern Ethiopia enabled the deciphering of eastern Africa's climatic heartbeat and shows how key phases of climate change influenced human evolution, dispersal and innovation.

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Mutations can drastically help or hurt the odds of an organism surviving and reproducing. Researchers have created a computer program called ExtRaINSIGHT that tracks the history of harmful mutations throughout human evolution. They've discovered several regions of the genome are especially vulnerable to mutations, meaning any mutations there could lead to severe or lethal consequences.

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In the largest early-medieval population study to date, an interdisciplinary team consisting of geneticists and archaeologists analyzed over 400 individuals from ancient Britain, Ireland, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. The results show in detail one of the largest population transformations in the post-Roman world.

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A team of scientists has discovered the earliest gibbon fossil, a find that helps fill a long-elusive evolutionary gap in the history of apes.

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The skulls of tetrapods had fewer bones than extinct and living fish, limiting their evolution for millions of years, according to a latest study.

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The question of what makes modern humans unique has long been a driving force for researchers. Comparisons with our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, therefore provide fascinating insights. The increase in brain size, and in neuron production during brain development, are considered to be major factors for the increased cognitive abilities that occurred during human evolution. However, while both Neanderthals and modern humans develop brains of similar size, very little is known about whether modern human and Neanderthal brains may have differed in terms of their neuron production during development. Researchers now show that the modern human variant of the protein TKTL1, which differs by only a single amino acid from the Neanderthal variant, increases one type of brain progenitor cells, called basal radial glia, in the modern human brain.

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Scientists use genomic data to resolve the phylogeny of zygnematophyte algae and pinpoint several emergences of multicellularity in the closest known relatives of terrestrial plants.

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The modalities and date of emergence of bipedalism remain bitterly debated, in particular because of a small number of very old human fossils. Sahelanthropus tchadensis, discovered in 2001 in Chad, is considered to be the oldest representative of the humankind. The shape of its cranium suggests a bipedal station. The description of three limb bones of Sahelanthropus confirms habitual bipedalism, but not exclusively.

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Research has established that there are traces of Neandertal DNA in the genome of modern humans. Now an exploratory study that assessed the facial structure of prehistoric skulls is offering new insights, and supports the hypothesis that much of this interbreeding took place in the Near East -- the region ranging from North Africa to Iraq.

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Did the 12th century B.C.E. -- a time when humans were forging great empires and developing new forms of written text -- coincide with an evolutionary reduction in brain size? Think again, says a team of researchers whose new paper refutes a hypothesis that's growing increasingly popular among the science community.

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New research provide evidence that the crustacean carapace, along with other plate-like structures in arthropods (crustaceans, insects, arachnids, and myriapods) all evolved from a lateral leg lobe in a common ancestor more than 500 million years ago. This work further supports their proposal for a new concept of how novel structures evolve -- one which suggests that they aren't so novel, after all.

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Researchers find that stem cells in the developing brain of modern humans take longer to divide and make fewer errors when distributing their chromosomes to their daughter cells, compared to those of Neanderthals.

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A newly identified 16th century horse specimen is among the oldest domestic horses from the Americas known to date, and its DNA helps clarify the history of horses in the Western Hemisphere, according to a new study.