Or, to put that somewhat more accurately, did not being able to kill adorable little bunnies in turn kill the Neanderthals? When all that stood between extinction and survival was figuring out how to hunt rabbits, it seems Neanderthals chose extinction.

If you're quickly trying to define what sets humans apart from other primates, you might first point to our greater intelligence and our capacity for complex language. The next big difference is that we walk on two feet and stay out of the trees... except, as this video explains, it's not quite that simple.

Our early human ancestors began to walk on two legs a couple of million years ago, abandoning their old life of swinging between tree branches and perching in the leafy forest canopies of Africa. Now, a new study suggests that this transition from the trees to the ground was a long one. It appears that our ancestor A. …

Late last year we reported on the remarkable discovery of a new ancient human ancestor, Australopithecus sediba — a finding that re-wrote the science books. Further research revealed that they were tree dwelling creatures who liked to eat tree bark. But given the small clues they left behind, we didn't have much else…

When science fiction writers and futurists imagine humans of the far future, they never think our descendants are going to look exactly the same as we do now. After all, we'll have access to powerful tools to turn us into cyborgs and hack our DNA, so there's no limit to how we could reinvent ourselves.

Most of us try to get more fiber in our diet — but we'll never get as much as some of our long-ago ancestors. Australopithecus sediba lived in Africa around two million years ago, and it looks like their diet was different from any other ancient hominin's.

When a chimpanzee goes to sleep, it first has to build a "nest", which allows it to sleep safely up in the trees. Strangely, chimpanzees also build nests when sleeping on the ground, which might reveal a secret about human evolution.

Why do humans have such enormous brains for our size? One popular explanation is that we needed the added cognitive capacity to deal with large, complex social groups. And now, a fascinating new computer simulation suggests that cooperation really did make us smarter.

Fire is one of the most important innovations in humanity's evolutionary history, but it's also one of the most mysterious. It leaves almost no trace in the archaeological record, and it's often impossible to determine when humans began controlling fire.

The world's most famous hominin fossil is Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis that had a chimp-like brain but walked upright like a human. Now a new discovery reveals that Lucy actually shared her world with another, very different hominin species.