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

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

Over the past 10,000 years, evolution in West Eurasia has been selecting for light skin, red hair and resistance to HIV and ...

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 human body is full of evolutionary compromises. The loss of the tail may be one of the clearest examples of how change ...

Data from more than 15,000 ancient people reveal natural selection of hundreds of genes linked to immunity, skin tone, ...

Saliva is a bodily fluid most of us take for granted despite the significant roles it plays: aiding in digestion, maintaining strong teeth and defending against oral disease. However, the evolution of ...

The human body is often described as a marvel of "perfect design": elegant, efficient and finely tuned for its purpose. Yet, ...

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 ...

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 ...

A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, finds that the relatively high rate of Autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in ...