Ancestry & Evolution
The desire to understand our origins is primal. By examining our DNA over successive generations through the evolutionary process of inherited characteristics of human and animal populations–as well as from those species from which humans share a common ancestry–we can decipher our individual and collective past and develop medical innovations for the future.
Below is the complete archive of related articles sorted by date.
Interactive pet calculator: How old is my dog in human years?
The average life expectancy of humans is about 70 years and that of dogs is about 10. For this reason, ...
Like humans, chimpanzees focus on fewer, more meaningful friendships as they age
Young adults maintain many friendships, but as people grow older, they tend to winnow that group down to a select ...
Experiencing happiness likely contributed to the dramatic growth and complexity of the human brain
The neocortex enables us to speak, dream and think. In search of the causes underlying neocortex expansion, researchers at the ...
Evolution’s ‘great leap forward’: When did humans cross the intelligence rubicon?
When did something like us first appear on the planet? It turns out there’s remarkably little agreement on this question ...
Interactive: How Pomeranians, Poodles, Great Danes and 158 other dog breeds are genetically related to each other
In the mid-18th century there was a period of intense innovation and codification in dog breeding, giving rise not only ...
How extreme environmental changes spurred early human evolution
[A]fter hundreds of thousands of years of stability, dramatic shifts occurred [in the East African Rift Valley] beginning about 400,000 ...
De-extinction efforts are being directed at reviving lost bird species
While efforts are underway to bring back extinct mammals, such as the woolly mammoth and quagga, through cloning, artificial insemination, ...
German measles likely jumped from bats to humans, much like COVID, raising concerns about future virus outbreaks
An estimated 100,000 newborns are affected by the [rubella virus] annually, mostly in Africa, the western Pacific, and the eastern ...
Gynandromorph: Spectacular bird found with male plumage on one side and female on the other
Split down the middle, with one side flaunting yellow 'wing pits', and the other side rocking a pink underwing, researchers ...
Will ‘cancel culture’ claim Darwin?
Given the scientific and political luminaries who have fallen under the axe, it’s not beyond possibility that Charles Darwin himself ...
Why evolution always goes in one direction
The diversity and complexity of life on Earth is astonishing: 8 million or more living species – from algae to ...
Recreating the Neanderthal Y chromosome helps explain how modern humans emerged
One hurdle in deciphering human prehistory is the absence of evidence of a Neanderthal Y chromosome in the genetic record ...
Neanderthals probably were not full time cave dwellers
Genetic, chemical and geological analysis tools help teams extract as much information as they can from the bones and tools ...
Only 67% of schools teach evolution is ‘settled science’ although teaching creationism in schools is on the wane
American teachers have not always been afforded the luxury of teaching evolution forthrightly. John Thomas Scopes, for example, was famously ...
How extensively did the Vikings explore the Americas a millennium ago?
Around the year 1000, Leif Erikson set sail from Greenland and landed first in ‘Stone-slab land’, then ‘Forest land’ and ...
Viewpoint: Evolution works – just look at the ‘success’ of the coronavirus
The scope and the devastation of the pandemic reflect bad luck, yes, and a dangerous world, yes, but also catastrophic ...
Deep waters of the Black Sea are a window into the first stages of evolution
In the deep waters of the Black Sea, scientists found microbes that can make membrane lipids, a layer that surrounds ...
Where are the world’s biodiversity hotspots and why do they matter?
Ecologists have long sought to understand why some areas of the planet are extraordinarily rich in species. The research set ...
Have humans hit an evolutionary wall? Top scientists offer their views
Our Stone Age ancestors who were faster runners avoided being trampled by mammoths and were more likely to have children ...
How anti-Semitism shaped the genes of Jewish people
Evidence of past outrages is not only in the history books. It's also written in our genomes ...
Vikings not purely Scandinavian and many were dark-haired, claims genetic study
Vikings were far from a single group of flaxen-haired, sea-faring Scandinavians. A genetic study of Viking-age human remains has not ...
2% of us carry Neanderthal genes. We are at greater risk for COVID
Scientists have claimed that a strand of DNA that triples the risk of developing severe Covid-19 was passed on from ...
Now mostly desert, what was Arabia like when humans migrated out of Africa?
Prior to the last ice age, somewhere between 112,000 and 122,000 years ago, two humans, possibly three, walked south along the shore ...
Evolution and the downsides of being so smart
With misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic, “cheap” and “deep” fakes of elected officials, and targeted ads and emotionally exploitative social media algorithms, ...
‘Complicated, messy and random’: Synthesizing old and new perspectives on human evolution
Darwin made astute observations about our kind and predictions about our ancient past based on the information that was available ...
After prehistoric asteroid destroyed most life on Earth, why were birds able to survive?
With hindsight, birds can be categorized as avian dinosaurs and all the other sorts—from Stegosaurus to Brontosaurus—are non-avian dinosaurs. The ...
Venus shows signs of life. Here’s what it means
We have only had the briefest of glimpses of a barren landscape from the two Russian landers that made it down to ...
Revisiting the Kon-Tiki hypothesis: Did ancient Americans really settle the Pacific?
An eccentric theory of human seagoing migration—made famous by one of the most insanely suicidal ‘scientific’ experiments ever undertaken—has recently ...
