Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

The work demonstrates the power of ancient DNA to illuminate human biology and medicine in addition to history. A massive ...

Human aging is not what natural selection failed to prevent. It is what happens when selection simply has nothing left to act ...

There was a moment in human history when our entire existence may have desperately clung to a thousand or more people.

Ancient DNA reveals how farming accelerated human evolution, driving genetic changes over the past 10,000 years.

Why do 90% of humans reach with the same hand? The answer stretches back millions of years and involves fossils, language and ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection.

A skull fragment discovered over fifty years ago on the banks of the Elbe River in Germany has finally yielded its secrets. Long considered by some researchers to be a rare Neanderthal-modern human ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

The hiccups you’ve been cursing since lunch are older than you could ever possibly imagine — a ghost signal from ancestors ...