Longer thumbs mean bigger brains and this is “pivotal” to human evolution, research has found. Scientists studied 94 fossils and living animals to understand how our ancestors developed their gripping ...

Twins have been rare in human history and for that reason can seem special. Many cultures associate twins with health and vitality, while others see them as a philosophical reminder of the duality of ...

I was in the magnificent Mayan ruins of Tikal, in the middle of the Guatemalan rainforest. It was 1970 and I was a 20-year-old student at Dartmouth College, travelling through Central America. Several ...

Between 2000 and 2023, more than 6,000 African primates were traded internationally in 50 countries, according to a newly ...

Unusual animals called aye-ayes, a species of Madagascan lemur, could have scampered fully formed from Edgar Allan Poe's forehead. Aye-ayes are primates, like humans and monkeys, but they display a ...

Researchers have traditionally theorized that the frontal cortex, a brain region linked to mental faculties such as planning and reasoning, expanded to an unprecedented extent during human evolution.

Researchers have identified the oldest known fossils of primates, dating them to around 65.9 million years ago. That’s just after one of Earth’s biggest mass extinction events, and it suggests that ...

Primates process visual information in front of their eyes, similar to pixels in a digital camera, using small computing units located in the visual cortex of their brains. In order to understand the ...

NATURE’s new mini-series “Primates” was filmed across the globe over two years on 28 filming expeditions, from snow-capped mountains to the hottest deserts. The mini-series includes many unique ...

Scientists researching primates, called "primatologists," have learned a lot over the years about our closest evolutionary ...

Primates threatened with extinction have highly specific parasites that will likely vanish if their hosts go extinct. Parasites play essential roles in ecosystems, but most are so understudied that ...