What makes the human brain different from that of other primates has long been a question. A new study suggests that the answer may be in a surprising twist of evolutionary fate: one of the brain’s ...

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 ...

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 ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution finds that the relatively high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in the past. The paper is titled "A general ...

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 ...

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.

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and ...

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 ...

We are indeed still evolving, though it can be hard to tell because it happens over generations and often involves things you can't see, such as what foods different people are able to digest. When ...

Our species, Homo sapiens, has been evolving for more than 300,000 years, but the story of human origins starts much earlier.