The human race’s first identifiable ancestor, it seems, was not a monkey, as the doubters of Charles Darwin jeered, but something that more closely resembled a rodent identified as Morganucodon, which ...

Human and chimpanzee genomes are more than 98% identical, and the genes themselves barely differ. The changes that make us human are thought to hide instead in the DNA that controls when and where ...

American essayist Cat Bohannon loves a bit of pop culture to contextualise her ideas. Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution – her ambitious, funny, intelligent history of ...

NOTICE: The project that is the subject of this report was approved by the Governing Board of the National Research Council, whose members are drawn from the councils of the National Academy of ...

A new Yale-led study provides one of the most detailed and comprehensive analyses to date of genetic variation in human populations in Oceania, filling a major gap in representation in genomics ...

In the final chapter of his book on the origins of vertebrate sex, author and paleontologist John Long pays homage to the humble placoderm, which got the erotic ball rolling.

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

Using genealogical relationships in DNA, Berkeley scientists have uncovered hidden contributions from extinct human populations that left no sequenced genomes. [Photo: Meaghan Marohn] A new study ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...

The human body is often described as a marvel of “perfect design”: elegant, efficient and finely tuned for its purpose. Yet, when we look closer, a rather different picture emerges. Far from being a ...