Evolution

Hallam L. Movius, Jr. Lecture Series Lecture by Jean-Jacques Hublin, Professor at the Collège de France (Paris), Emeritus Professor at the Max Planck Society The arrival of Homo sapiens in the mid-latitudes of Eurasia 48,000 to 45,000 years ago and the...

Our ancestors hunted big game for the same reasons some of us drive fancy cars or carry a designer handbag: status. The hunters were hungry for prestige, and the meat was a bonus. The Evolution of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics Hallam L...

The earliest complex societies found in the Western Hemisphere developed under very different environmental conditions. The Maya, for instance, emerged in the tropical lowlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, a region with high seasonal rainfall and rich...

Human evolutionary scholars have long assumed that the earliest stone tools were made by members of the genus Homo, 2.4–2.3 million years ago, and that this technological development was directly linked to climate change and the spread of savannah...

In the late nineteenth century, Charles Darwin proposed that all humans share a common ancestor and that evolution likely began in Africa. He expected controversy over his revolutionary idea, even suggesting that Harvard professor Louis Agassiz might...

Modern humans and our closest-living ape relatives differ in developmental and reproductive biology, as well as in lifespans, but evolutionary anthropologists do not know when these distinctive characteristics evolved. It might seem that our development...