Neanderthals painted on cave walls in Spain 65,000 years ago – tens of thousands of years before modern humans arrived, say researchers

A collection of bones from Casablanca holds important new clues to the origins of modern humans and Neanderthals.

Neanderthals kept building bone into their faces well into adolescence, while our own growth patterns, genes and cultural innovations pushed the midface inward and the jaw back. The result is a modern human face that is less about brute force and more about fine control, expression and social signaling.

The cave, known as Grotte à Hominidés, contains assemblages of jawbones, teeth, and vertebrae dating back to 773,000 years ago – a period close to when the modern human lineage began to diverge from the ancestors we share with Neanderthals and Denisovans.

For years, researchers analyzing traumatic injuries found on Neanderthal fossils believed they had lived dangerous, violent lives. But a new study reveals that early modern humans and Neanderthals both suffered the same level of head trauma. Other WRAL Top ...

Neanderthals and humans mated millennia ago, and their legacy lives on in us today. Here's how. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. The group had traveled for thousands of miles, crossing ...

On the slopes of Mount Carmel in northern Israel, a small skull has changed the story of human history. Buried in Skhul Cave roughly 140,000 years ago, the remains of a five-year-old child show that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens were far more intertwined ...

Neanderthals died out some 30,000 years ago, but their genes live on within many of us. African people have very little Neanderthal DNA because their ancestors didn't make the trip through Eurasia, scientists think. Computational biologist Michael ...

Clues from studies of ancient plants and animals have helped archaeologists pin down where the last Neanderthals found refuge, says columnist Michael Marshall