Prehistory
Little Foot: The Most Complete Australopithecus Skeleton
StW 573 became the most complete Australopithecus skeleton known, unveiled in 2017 after two decades of excavation, though its age and species remain debated.
Era · Before c. 3000 BC
Prehistory
From the formation of Earth and the age of dinosaurs to the first cave art and monuments, before writing was invented.
Prehistory
Laetoli Footprints: The 3.66-Million-Year-Old Hominin Trackway
The trackway proved that hominins walked fully upright with a human-like stride by about 3.66 million years ago, long before the enlargement of the brain.
Prehistory
Kenyanthropus platyops: The Flat-Faced Man of Lake Turkana
The cranium KNM-WT 40000 was named as a new genus and species in 2001, suggesting several hominin lineages lived alongside Lucy's species, though its status is still debated.
Prehistory
Lomekwi 3: The Oldest Known Stone Tools, Found in Kenya
The Lomekwi 3 artefacts, published in 2015, pushed the known start of stone toolmaking back by roughly 700,000 years, to a time before the earliest known fossils of the genus Homo.
Prehistory
Lucy: The 3.2-Million-Year-Old Australopithecus Skeleton
The skeleton AL 288-1 became the best-known early hominin fossil and, in 1978, part of the basis for naming Australopithecus afarensis, showing that upright walking preceded large brains.
Prehistory
Taung Child: Raymond Dart and the First Australopithecus Fossil
Dart named a new genus and species, Australopithecus africanus; rejected for two decades, it was accepted as a human relative by the late 1940s.
Prehistory
Great American Biotic Interchange: When Two Continents Met
The land bridge allowed hundreds of species to spread between the Americas, reshaping the wildlife of both continents, especially South America.
Prehistory
Oldowan Tools: The First Stone Tool Industry of Olduvai
The Oldowan became the first stone tool tradition to spread widely across Africa and into Eurasia, and it was the technological base from which the Acheulean developed.
Prehistory
Smilodon: The Sabre-Toothed Cat of the Ice Age Americas
Smilodon became one of the top predators of the Americas before dying out at the end of the last Ice Age, around 10,000 years ago.
Prehistory
Mrs Ples: The Sterkfontein Australopithecus africanus Skull
The skull helped convince scientists that Australopithecus africanus was a hominin and became South Africa's best-known fossil.
Prehistory
Homo habilis: The 'Handy Man' of Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania
Fossils from Olduvai were named Homo habilis in 1964, extending the genus Homo back to nearly two million years ago and tying it to the earliest stone tools.
Prehistory
Australopithecus sediba: The Malapa Fossils Found by a Boy
Two partial skeletons were named Australopithecus sediba in 2010, revealing a hominin that mixed ape-like and human-like features close to the time Homo appeared.