Nine runners-up plus the top science achievement of the year
Stop Investigating Me! Or Else! W. Kamau Bell's Candid Conversation With Two Anti-Abortion Activists. Exploding Star Spews Building Blocks of Life. A Louisiana Town in the Heart of 'Cancer Alley'. 'Stable Genius' Needs an 'Intervention'? Two Views.
Even before there were Homo sapiens, our distant forebears had a mix of genes for light and dark skin.
Elizabeth Warren on Trump and Republicans' Attempt to Bludgeon the Judiciary Into Submission. Bernie Cranks Up the Heat in DC. John Oliver: Debt Buyers. Bernie on Talk With Obama and Where Next. Hobbit Histories: The Origins of Homo Floresiensis.
Jaw and teeth discovered in Indonesia after search team had almost given up hope shed new light on how quickly one branch of humans evolved.
The origins of the species known as 'the hobbit' - a human relative only a little over a metre tall - have been debated ever since its discovery in 2004. Now new fossils may reveal the ancestors of this strange species and help us to understand its history.
Homo naledi adds a new human relative that was primitive but shared physical characteristics with modern humans. The location of the fossil bones suggests that they were deliberately disposed of underground.
Stone tools unearthed at a site in Kenya predate any identified human ancestors -- previously thought to be the first makers of stone tools -- by hundreds of thousands of years. These finds "will force us [to rethink] what makes us humans ... Increasing knowledge of our remote past is casting doubts on previous certainties and is showing that the process of becoming what we are now is far more gradual than what we previously thought."
While very little in paleoanthropology is ever “settled,” a new study represents an important step forward in terms of settling that the "Hobbit" people were really a different human species, and not pathological individuals of Homo sapiens. The question that remains to be answered definitively is which species of archaic Homo is the most likely ancestor of Homo floresiensis.
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