Topic description and stories

Australopithecus afarensis reconstruction

Opinion: No giant leap for mankind: why we’ve been looking at human evolution in the wrong way

14 Jun 2016

Robert Foley (Department of Archaeology and Anthropology) discusses the cumulative processes by which we became human.

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A Young Chimpanzee Playing with Twigs

Tool use is 'innate' in chimpanzees but not bonobos, their closest evolutionary relative

16 Jun 2015

First evidence for a species difference in the innate predisposition for tool use in our closest evolutionary cousins could provide insight into how...

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Left: A view across a valley in the Messak landscape. Right: A Levallois core, a distinctive type of Middle Stone Age stone tool, recovered on the surface of the Messak

Saharan 'carpet of tools' is the earliest known man-made landscape

11 Mar 2015

Researchers used the new survey of the Messak Settafet to estimate that enough stone tools were discarded over the course of human evolution in...

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A chimpanzee uses a stone to crack a nut

Opportunity, and not necessity, is the mother of invention

12 Nov 2014

When food is scarce, tool use among non-human primates does not increase. This counterintuitive finding leads researchers to suggest that the driving...

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Chimp eating army ants using an 'ant-dipping' tool

Chimpanzees have favourite ‘tool set’ for hunting staple food of army ants

16 Oct 2014

New research shows that chimpanzees search for the right tools from a key plant species when preparing to ‘ant dip’ - a crafty technique enabling...

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Example of one of the stone tools found recently at Willendorf

They weren’t wimps: how modern humans, like Neanderthals, braved the northern cold

23 Sep 2014

Recent finds at Willendorf in Austria reveal that modern humans were living in cool steppe-like conditions some 43,500 years ago – and that their...

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Isampur

The thinking hominid

01 Feb 2008

The discovery in southern India of a well-preserved quarry dating from a million years ago is helping researchers to answer: how intelligent were our...

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