Traditionally, only human ancestors were placed in the family Hominidae (and thereby referred to as hominids). This reflected a view that humans are substantially different from the great apes ...

The fellowship that we call humanity contains some unlikely characters, not least of all a diminutive extinct species known ...

In the 8 million years or so since the earliest ancestors of humans diverged from the apes, at least a dozen humanlike species, called hominids, have lived on Earth. And this list is getting longer.

As the African landscape shifted gradually from dense forests toward large patches of savannah, early hominids found their food supplies waning, leading them to descend from the trees and become ...