The story of human origins is a messy affair and it seems to get more complicated with every new discovery. It is now clear that the tidy idea of the first "out of Africa" migration about one million years ago is wrong – some of our human ancestors must have emerged from our ancestral homeland much earlier than that.

Chris Columbus has been the directorial hand behind some dire movies – Home Alone, Nine Months, Stepmom – but he at least tries something slightly different here, with a script by Larry Doyle that almost tips into raunchiness.

You don't need to go all the way to Australia to see stunning examples of rock art. Mark Rowe found plenty to explore right here in our own back yard

Infertile couples may be spared years of fruitless treatment with the discovery that the human egg can read the father's genetic key and screen out failures

Lascaux II, Montignac, Dordogne

As the Americans embark on a new peace mission, Donald Macintyre reports from a West Bank village trapped by its history but now lit up with help from across the divide

With its grotesquely exaggerated features, this could easily be the work of one of the 20th century's great figurative artists. But this voluptuous Venus was carved out of a mammoth's tusk more than 35,000 years ago.

35,000-year-old skull fragments found in Romania are made flesh by scientists

John Naish's thesis is that we in the affluent West have more than enough of what we need, yet cannot stop gorging ourselves, both literally and metaphorically.

We look back to the Stone Age and think it embodied 'traditional' values

A Stone Age burial ground, where the bodies of adults and children lay together for thousands of years entwined in tender embraces, has provided the earliest evidence for the existence of the nuclear family.

Discovery of fossilised pelvis forces scientists to revise view of Homo erectus

They are not scoring many tries – one in three games can hardly be described as extravagant – but as they are not conceding any at all, Sale are decent value for their position at the top of the Guinness Premiership table. Bristol, clear underdogs despite home advantage at the Memorial Ground last night, tried desperately hard to record a first win of the season, but the new law variations have rendered their traditional driving game redundant. Sale have more flexibility, and it showed here.

Neanderthals were not as stupid as they have been portrayed, according to a study showing their stone tools were just as good as those made by the early ancestors of modern humans, Homo sapiens.