In this video segment adapted from NOVA, see how paleoanthropologists—including Don Johanson, with his famous discovery of the Australopithecus afarensis "Lucy"—have used the fossil record to identify ...

Hominins may have transitioned to walking on two feet over 7 million years ago.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Bipedal locomotion - walking upright on two legs - is a fundamental trait underpinning humankind's success. Scientists now have identified two innovations that occurred long ago ...

Humans might have evolved our two-footed posture for its fighting advantage; we punch harder standing than on all fours, and downward punches are much more forceful than upward ones. This could also ...

A male western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), photographed at the Bronx Zoo. The origin of human bipedalism has long been a hot topic among paleoanthropologists. At the very least it is seen as something ...

Human bipedalism may have evolved to protect babies too heavy to hang on our increasingly hairless bodies, says Brazilian physicist Lia Amaral. Apart from Homo sapiens, primate babies cling to the fur ...

Near a lake in Kenya, researchers have found ancient footprints of large birds, horse and antelope relatives, and they've also found evidence of two distinct human ancestors. As NPR's Jessica Yung ...

Carl Sagan famously said, “We are made of star stuff.” For modern humans, this may be true in a very unexpected way. Research published Tuesday in The Journal of Geology suggests that stars are what ...

This is an important question because many anthropologists see bipedalism – which means walking on two legs – as one of the defining characteristics of “hominins,” or modern humans, and their ...

In recent decades, scientists have debated whether a seven-million-year-old fossil was bipedal—a trait that would make it the oldest human ancestor. A new analysis by a team of anthropologists offers ...