hominin
How did the modern human face evolve to look the way it does?
The fossil site of Malapa in the Cradle of Humankind, South Africa yielded two partial skeletons
FOXP2, a gene implicated in affecting speech and language, is held up as a textbook example of positive selection on a human-specific trait
Our species' ability to occupy diverse and "extreme" settings around the world stands in stark contrast to the ecological adaptations of other hominin taxa
The "virtual" revisiting of a fossil described as "the oldest evidence of human evolution in South Africa" shows surprising results
The discovery helps round out the picture of a creature that scientists now know shared the landscape with modern humans—and probably other hominin species—between 226,000 and 335,000 years ago
