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.
Is religion an artifact of small-brained superstition or a mark of our evolutionary advancement?
By about ten to seven thousand years ago, modern Homo sapiens were domesticating animals and plants and creating stable civilizations ...
Men were hunters, women were gatherers? New research challenges early assumed gender roles
New research contradicts the common belief that in foraging societies, only men hunt and women gather, revealing that women actively ...
Sweetness and bitterness: The evolutionary story of how our sense of taste evolved
The sweetness of sugar is one of life’s great pleasures. People’s love for sweet is so visceral, food companies lure ...
Ancient population crash: How humans almost went extinct
Humans may have been driven to the brink of extinction within the past million years, new research suggests ...
Genetic doppelgängers? Identical twins separated apart can be very much alike or very different. Here’s why
What do the lives of twins tell us about heritability, selfhood and the age-old debate between nature and nurture? ...
Cold snap: How plummeting temperatures a million years ago almost killed off Europe’s earliest humans
A period of extreme cooling in western Europe may have driven away the continent’s earliest human species, researchers say ...
Talking Biotech Podcast: Kevin Folta talks with a crime lab expert on how DNA can solve cold cases
DNA has been an invaluable tool to make certain matches between a suspect and a crime. Since its early use ...
Skin vision: How bizarre hogfish that ‘sees with its skin’ can help us develop robotic limbs and self-driving cars
Without a mirror, it can be hard to tell if you're blushing, or have spinach in your teeth. But one ...
Challenging the Africa human origin hypothesis: Turkish fossils suggest apes and humans may have shared earlier European ancestry
Human and ape ancestors arose in Europe: A newly described fossil suggests that the ancestor of humans and apes arose ...
Science vs spirituality: The case of the severed head
There’s a ghastly severed head in St Robert’s Roman Catholic church, just down the road from me in Catforth, northern ...
Video: Glass see-through squid with ‘demon-like’ red eyes swims in the deep waters off the coast of Alaska
The see-through cephalopod was spotted by researchers exploring the deep sea surrounding Alaska's Aleutian Islands ...
Video: This extremely rare baby giraffe was born without spots
A baby giraffe was born at Brights Zoo in Limestone, Tennessee, without any patterns! Zoo director David Bright joins TODAY ...
Why can humans speak but monkeys can’t? It may be due to this one brain quirk
Speech is unique to humans, but most of the brain structures involved in speech production are also present in Old ...
What explains Homo sapiens’ huge brains? Ancient climate change played a role
Climate change may have contributed to the increase in the brain size of human ancestors, a new study suggests ...
Viewpoint: Bringing the mammoth back — Is it time to slow down de-extinction mania?
De-extinction is the science of restoring lost species and it has been in the news, sporadically, for decades ...
Infographic: Tree of Sex — Cataloging wild ways nature reproduces, from sex-changing fish to asexual lizards
From sex-changing fish to asexual lizards, these and many more species will be captured in a new sex database ...
Evolution of humor: Smiles are silent — so why do we hear laughter?
Laughter: Auditory signals were probably more effective in communicating feelings of mutual vulnerability during play ...
Why we overeat — and how studying voracious locusts may help us learn to curtail a dangerous human vice
This story starts in an unusual place for an article about human nutrition: a cramped, humid and hot room somewhere ...
Searching for answers: Why asking questions make us uniquely human
Evolution of propositional speech: Human self-consciousness is about generating justification systems for one's self and others ...
Cute canine head tilt: What are dogs thinking?
Canine behavior: research suggests the animals might cock their furry noggins when processing familiar words ...
‘Third human lineage’: Previously unknown human ancestor unearthed in China provokes speculation
In East China, specifically at the site called Hualongdong, scientists conducted an excavation and discovered fossils pointing to a possible ...
Podcast: Debating doppelgangers — How do two completely different people end up with the same face?
What can doppelgangers tell us about nature versus nurture? – podcast ...
Viewpoint: ‘Animal individualism’ ― Why picking and choosing which animal species should survive or die is a terrible idea
How should humans care for the beings that share the planet with us? This is one of the defining questions of ...
The Hidden Spring: Controversial new book addresses where consciousness originates
Viewpoint: Why and how does the subjective quality of experience arise from objective neurophysiological events? ...
Look into the past: Researchers recreate face of ‘oldest human’ with 45,000-year-old skull
Scientists have revealed the face of what may be the 'oldest human' to walk the Earth - a woman who ...
Questioning the miracle of life: How did an inanimate universe ‘create’ fire, water and humans?
How did an inanimate universe become animate? That question has been the cause of wars and the inspiration for many ...
What are the prospects that we might soon face another coronavirus-like viral pandemic?
There are signs of a mid-summer surge in COVID-19 cases, particularly in the Midwest and West, that have some experts ...
