Watch Early Humans: Ice, Stone, and Survival

Although agriculture was historically framed as a

Explore the recent scientific discoveries that have revealed more nuanced lifeways about the last Ice Age than were previously known. Learn why the narrative about life in North Africa has also shifted. Learn about the ritual practice of dental evulsion that seems to reveal population and cultural exchanges between North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, the Levant, throughout this period.

As the world began to warm and vegetation changed, people turned to new dietary options instead of having to follow large migratory herds across the landscape. Discover the scientific methods used to reveal exactly what our ancestors ate during this period.

About 15,000 years ago, people began to settle down and adopt certain aspects of sedentary agricultural lifestyles in the eastern Mediterranean region. Explore the exciting discoveries of this time period, including the purposeful brewing of beer and the domestication of dogs.

Explore the world of 15,000 years ago as the last ice age ended, and the vast ice sheets began to melt. Discover the scientific advances that have allowed us to describe that world in detail, a world with H. sapiens living on every continent except Antarctica. How did those people

Changes in tool form and function are among the foremost markers of the arrival of the modern mind. Explore the materials used and the many new tool forms that appeared tens of thousands of years ago. From fishing hooks to sewing needles, evidence shows an explosion of new technologies developed by our ancestors well before the appearance of agriculture.

While our ancestors did utilize caves in some capacity

Explore the varied human diet that existed even before the domestication of plants and animals. Learn about the research tools

When did people first start to bury their dead and grapple with the meaning of death? Explore the many varied burial practices of our ancestors and how those practices reveal their social structures and relationships with their environment. Was H. sapiens the only species to use ritual burials long ago, or did the Neanderthals also develop this practice?

We might not like to think about body lice as a source of information about our history, but it is genetic evidence from this insect that points to humans wearing clothes as early as 170,000 years ago. Discover what we can learn about our early cognition by exploring the ways we adorned ourselves, from clothing to jewelry to tattoos.

Consider the earliest evidence for human modification of physical material for aesthetic purposes: art. What can we learn from the fact that artwork surfaced everywhere early humans were found, not just in one region? From cave paintings to rock art and figurines to human-made pigments, who were the people who created these artifacts and what were they wanting to accomplish?

Learn about the combination of fossil and DNA evidence that have helped us understand when and how human language evolved. But what about the full range of human communications

How were Homo sapiens able to get to Australia 60,000-plus years ago without a land bridge to travel? Discover the evidence that exists for their travel by water and the scientific methods used to date the earliest H. sapiens discovered in Australia. To what extent were the First Australians responsible for the extinction of the continent

Explore the culture-rich lives of the Neanderthals, who existed for more than 300,000 years across a vast geographic space

Discover the complexity of early human history by meeting

How did H. sapiens adapt to new environments by changing our diet and using technology as we spread across the Old World? Learn how the study of prehistory through molecular genetics has both transformed and confounded our understanding of the human fossil record.

Meet Homo erectus, the first of our genus to walk completely upright. Being one of the longest-lasting hominin species

Meet Homo habilis, the earliest known species of our genus. Discovered in 1960, at that time it was the first species known to have used tools. We have since discovered tool use in many animal species. But what does distinguish H. habilis from all previously evolved organisms? It

Discover when humans developed and consider the questions we need to ask to explore early life. In setting the framework for our species