Michael Marshall

Stone tools are considered the first form of technology devised by ancient humans – but they might not have been invented from scratch

Recordings of brain activity in budgerigars reveal sets of brain cells that represent different sounds like keys on a keyboard – a structure never seen before in any bird brain

Bone fragments from a cave in northern Spain suggest there were multiple hominin species living in western Europe around a million years ago

Farming arose on multiple continents among populations with radically different cultures and environments and with no means of communicating with each other – how did it crop up independently at about the same time?

Hominins may have learned how to make bone tools by adapting the techniques they mastered for stone ones

By far the oldest evidence of humans living in dense forests comes from a site in Ivory Coast, where stone tools and plant remains reveal a human presence stretching back 150,000 years

Preserved wooden spears from hundreds of thousands of years ago seem to have been suitable for throwing, not just close-range attacks

Grave warnings have been issued about the dangers of creating life forms using mirror-image molecules. How worried should we be?

Fossils and genetics are starting to point to life emerging surprisingly soon after Earth formed, when the planet was hellishly hot and seemingly uninhabitable

Today, the upheavals of plate tectonics continually reshape Earth. When this began is much disputed

A new look at fossils from the Cambrian Period around 500 million years ago has revealed that some of the earliest animals spent time on mudflats that were sometimes exposed to the air

The surprising discovery of entities smaller than viruses raises profound questions about what life is and how it got started

Australopithecus came before us, but that doesn't tell us which specific individual species is our ancestor

A huge study of ancient DNA reveals the origins of the Yamna, who spread across Eurasia around 5000 years ago, showing they came from a mixing of populations north of the Black Sea

Some animals – and even machines – may turn out to be conscious. Must we wait for scientific certainty before sharing our rights, asks The Moral Circle