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.
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‘It’s no wonder that music, like language, is universal among us’: Rhythm improves human cooperation, giving us a major survival advantage
Research team recorded songs in 55 languages to find that songs share certain features not found in speech ...
Grey giants or little green men? If there is intelligent alien life on other planets, what might it look like?
The search for alien life is one of humanity's greatest missions, but it may look nothing like anything we've seen ...
Religion evolves, too: Before modern Christianity, God had a wife
In addition to inscriptions, researchers have found a number of small female ceramic figurines indicating God had a wife ...
Is tilapia a human-made freak that we should avoid — or an evolutionary rockstar?
Posts were appearing on my Facebook feed warning against the dangers of eating tilapia. So I decided to do a ...
‘Anthropocene’ debate: Scientists disagree over whether we are in a new geological epoch, and here’s why it matters
A panel of scientists rejected the term “Anthropocene” to describe a period in which humans have profoundly impacted the environment ...
What’s in a name? Elephants, along with parrots and dolphins, appear to identify each other
Wild African elephants address each other with name-like calls, a rare ability among nonhuman animals, according to a new study ...
How and why did dogs develop ‘puppy eyes’?
Large and droopy “puppy-dog eyes” did not just evolve in domesticated dogs to appeal to humans, as scientists had previously thought, according ...
‘We are machines—but astoundingly complex ones’: Philosopher Daniel Dennett on how human consciousness evolved
Daniel Dennett believed that we are, in a sense, machines—but astoundingly complex ones, the result of millions of years of ...
What can Chesapeake Bay tell us about how and when humans first made it to the Americas?
The story of the first Americans has long been a matter of public and scientific fascination, undergirded at times by ...
Many of us would give an arm and a leg (and maybe a finger or two) to know what humans can learn from cockroaches
I've admired the cockroach’s ability to regrow lost legs since learning about them while working on my PhD in developmental ...
Cockroaches: How a South Asian vermin unexpectedly conquered the world
A ubiquitous household pest has unexpected origins. A cockroach that lives in human dwellings all over the world is known ...
Our brains have gotten smaller over the last 100,000 years. What’s going on?
The brains of modern humans are around 13% smaller than those of Homo sapiens who lived 100,000 years ago ...
GLP podcast: Mother Jones blasts AAP anti-GMO report; Animals mistreated on organic farms? Why did humans evolve to love music?
Once fiercely skeptical of "Big Ag," even adamantly progressive media outlets like Mother Jones are beginning to embrace the use ...
What makes humans great long distance runners?
Endurance running when hunting for game shows that it may be just as efficient as other more traditional hunting methods ...
Darwinian survival guide: Evolutionary biologist gives his advice in the face of disruptive climate change
Adaption of humanity: An evolutionary biologist and a science fiction writer walk into a bar... and mull over survival ...
Video: A squid with blinding high-beam lights? This adaptation helps this deep-ocean predator hunt down prey
The Dana squid has all the tools of a top ocean predator, including a pair of "headlights" it flashes at ...
More fertile years ahead: Are women on an evolutionary path toward delaying menopause well into their 50s?
In recent decades, people around the world, especially in wealthy, developed countries, have been starting their families later and later ...
‘Only hope left’: Is it too late for gene editing to rescue Australia’s endangered marsupial northern quoll?
In a laboratory in the University of Melbourne earlier this year, PhD student Pierre Ibri was running an experiment that ...
Question the shared evolution of all living beings? Here are 32 animals that share some human qualities
From chimps to Harvard students, many members of the animal kingdom demonstrate surprisingly human-like behavior ...
Is there an evolutionary explanation for human’s love of music?
In a new study, researchers found universal features of songs across many cultures, suggesting that music evolved in our distant ...
Why is the human evolutionary tree so bushy and weird?
Human evolution might be more "bizarre" than we once thought, according to a new study. In the past, scientists believed ...
‘There is ‘a real possibility’ that reptiles, insects, octopuses and mammals have consciousness, scientists declare
Crows, chimps and elephants: these and many other birds and mammals behave in ways that suggest they might be conscious. And the list does ...
What might a Neanderthal woman look like? Here’s a digitally recreated face
A new documentary has recreated the face of a 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal whose flattened skull was discovered and rebuilt from hundreds of bone fragments by ...
Acorns, pine nuts, pistachios, oats: Here’s what people ate 15,000 years ago, before the dawn of agriculture
The advent of agriculture roughly 11,500 years ago in the Middle East was a milestone for humankind - a revolution in diet ...
‘Competition between species has shaped our own evolutionary tree’: Human evolution works the ‘complete opposite’ way than most other animals
Interspecies competition in ancient humans saw an evolutionary trend that is the complete opposite of almost all other vertebrates, according to a ...
How prehistoric agriculture spread from the Fertile Crescent south through Africa
The Neolithic age – when agriculture and animal farming were adopted – has become one of the most widely studied ...
Were Neanderthals cannibals?
At this point, there’s little doubt Neanderthals ate each other, even if the practice doesn't appear to have been widespread ...
