Video: The long arm and short legs wars in palaeoanthropology

For decades a war raged within the field of palaeoanthropology. At the center of the battle were some of the most important fossils hominids ever discovered, the fossils from Hadar in Ethiopia, and included the famous Lucy ...

Video: The muddle in the middle-Pleistocene

During the late middle Pleistocene—between 400 000 and 150 0000 years ago—the populations occupying Earth, and Africa specifically, looked very differently from what they do now. There is evidence for at least three forms ...

Tongzi hominids are potentially a new human ancestor in Asia

The CENIEH has been participating in a comparative research about human teeth discovered in this Southern China site which has revealed that Tongzi's teeth do not fit the morphological pattern of traditional Homo erectus.

Inbred Neanderthals left humans a genetic burden

The Neanderthal genome included harmful mutations that made the hominids around 40% less reproductively fit than modern humans, according to estimates published in the latest issue of the journal Genetics. Non-African humans ...

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The Hominidae (pronounced /hɒˈmɪnɨdiː/; anglicized hominids, also known as great apes), as the term is used here, form a taxonomic family, including four extant genera: chimpanzees (Pan), gorillas (Gorilla), humans (Homo), and orangutans (Pongo).

It is also common to use the term in a more restricted sense of humans and relatives of humans closer than chimpanzees. In this usage, all species other than Homo sapiens are extinct.

A number of known extinct genera are grouped with humans in the Homininae subfamily, others with orangutans in the Ponginae subfamily. The most recent common ancestor of the Hominidae lived roughly 14 million years ago, when the ancestors of the orangutans speciated from the ancestors of the other three genera. The ancestors of the Hominidae family had already speciated from those of the Hylobatidae family, perhaps 15-20 million years ago.
