Did Humans Evolve in Europe Rather than Africa? We Don’t Have the Answer Just Yet

Charles Darwin believed that humans evolved in Africa, because that’s where our closest ape relatives the chimpanzees and gorillas live. And during the twentieth century he was vindicated through a combination of fossil and genetic discoveries. While our place in the tree of life is now well established – chimpanzees being our closest relatives –…

Why Are Humans Unique? It’s the Small Things That Count

Can there be any more important a question than, ‘How did we get here?’ Of course, I don’t mean those books we all gawked at as tweens desperate to understand our transforming pubescent bodies. I mean, ‘How did we get here, as a species?’ ‘How did we come to be so different to all other…

Brain Versus Brawn: Evolution of the Bubble-Headed Weakling

One of the most important questions we can ask – and one that continues to take up much of the time of scientists, philosophers and the religious minded alike – is why are humans so different to the rest of the living world? Philosophers and physicists have even celebrated the appearance of humans 200,000 years…