This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have evolved testicles of all different sizes. In almost all these separate cases, ...

New research reveals ancient humans in southern Africa lived in isolation for nearly 100,000 years. This led to unique genetic traits not seen in modern populations. These findings show human ...

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 ...

On Valentine’s Day in 2018, a team of scientists walked across a flat expanse in the badlands of northeastern Ethiopia, scanning the ground for fossils. An eagle-eyed field assistant, Omar Abdulla, ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

In 1990, an ancient human skull was unearthed in China's Hubei Province that was so badly deformed during fossilization that it was hard to gauge its significance. A new analysis now indicates that ...

Ancient volcanic eruptions may hold the key to pin down a timeline of early human evolution. Volcanic ash layers in Kenya’s Turkana Basin help date early human fossils more precisely High-precision ...

Revolutionary fossil evidence from Ethiopia is challenging decades of scientific consensus about human origins. New discoveries suggest that the famous Lucy fossil, long considered a direct ancestor ...

A new study concludes that the speed at which the human brain evolved may help explain why our species experiences autism. According to the authors, certain genes associated with autism are ...

When you learned about the history of human evolution in school, there's a good chance you were shown one all-too-familiar image. That picture probably showed a conga line of human-like creatures, ...