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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How culture and technology are shaping human evolution
Cultural changes are likely affecting modern human evolution in ways we don’t yet understand. For example, research has shown that ...
Here is evidence of recent human evolution. Will it help us adapt to rapid climate change?
From emergence of Homo Sapiens within the history of primates and beginning to tread the Earth being an early man ...
Can what we eat change the world?
How should we live in relation to food and our food system? In this article I suggest a return to ...
Sixth Mass Extinction: Why the world may be headed for a global biodiversity catastrophe, assessment claims
The history of life on Earth has been marked five times by events of mass biodiversity extinction caused by extreme ...
The brain science behind thirst
It feels so simple. When we're thirsty, we drink. But the brain science behind that decision is pretty complicated, a ...
‘Dating, mating, rating and hating’: Male-female sex differences rooted in more than 1,000 brain-related genes in mice — and almost certainly in humans
According to a new study led by Stanford University and published in the journal Cell, male and female mouse brains ...
Long-standing belief that meat-eating helped drive human evolution called into question
There’s a widespread belief that eating meat became much more common with the advent of big-brained Homo erectus, two million ...
What happens next after the Omicron wave abates? Only the coronavirus knows for sure
The surge fueled by the Omicron variant will likely fade in the weeks ahead in the United States, experts say, ...
Viewpoint: Theistic evolution — Can we reconcile religion with science?
Evolution by natural selection does not require any divine or supernatural intervention. For some people, the idea of evolution as ...
More confirmation that people who have these Neanderthal genes are better protected against severe COVID
The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has now entered its third year. Since its inception, it has infected people differently ...
‘Contemporary evolution’: How pollution and human interventions are speeding up evolution
Wild populations must continuously adapt to environmental changes or risk extinction. For more than fifty years, scientists have described instances ...
‘Paying the price for productivity’: Studying ancient barley, safflower and lentil grains can help us recover lost nutrients
What can we learn from the past to address modern problems in food quality and nutrition? This is the question ...
End game for COVID? Predicting a quick end to the pandemic is premature, WHO chief warns
The World Health Organization’s director-general on [January 24] warned that conditions remain ideal for more coronavirus variants to emerge and ...
Sugar high? How and why we genetically crave sweetness
A fundamental challenge for our ancient ancestors was getting enough to eat. The basic activities of day-to-day life, such as ...
5 human species that played a role in our evolutionary history
We’re so used to the idea of being the only people around that it seems outlandish to think that not ...
‘All animal species have a beginning and an end’: Richard Leakey’s legacy in shaping ‘conservation politics’
Richard Leakey, paleoanthropologist, conservationist and Kenyan political leader, died January 2 at his home near Nairobi. His expeditions discovered hundreds ...
Aerobically stronger? Human lung capacity appears to be measurably expanding
For many years now, doctors and other health personnel in Norway and several other European countries have surveyed people’s lung ...
Did cannibalism play a role in the extinction of the Neanderthals?
Spanish anthropologists Jordi Augustí and Xavier Rubio-Campillo (2016) conducted a virtual experiment to study factors underlying the extinction of Neandertals ...
If humans go extinct, what ‘smart’ animals might evolve to ‘rule the world’?
What if humans suddenly went extinct? What other animals might evolve to have the smarts and skills to create large, ...
Does ‘cringe-worthy baby talk’ between couples serve an evolutionary purpose?
Baby talk is cute when grown-ups dote on babies. But when adults converse with each other? Not so much. Yet ...
Before Neanderthals: Untangling the vast web of pre-modern human ancestors
When paleontologists and anthropologists look back at the history of hominin evolution, they find a veritable Gordian Knot, one that ...
‘You act like a Neanderthal’? Consensus view changes — Homo Sapiens no smarter than our extinct cousins
We’ve long thought that humans must have survived because we were intelligent enough to outsmart our own extinction; meanwhile the ...
What are the evolutionary origins of modern-day marijuana?
The cultivation of marijuana has much longer roots than we previously understood, according to [a new] study — including evidence ...
Why is Omicron such a ‘super-spreading variant’?
In a household, the risk of spreading the omicron variant to another member is three times higher than it is ...
What is a human being? The evolution of ‘personhood’
It is at the intersection between psychology and the social sciences (as well as humanities and philosophy) that we find ...
How Watson and Crick predicted the origin of Omicron and laid the groundwork for COVID-19 vaccines
The tantalizing final sentence to James Watson and Francis Crick’s landmark 1953 paper in Nature introducing the genetic material, DNA, ...
Why geneticists are moving away from using the term ‘race’ — but not its meaning
Geneticists are moving away from using the term "race" in their papers, but the meaning of replacement descriptors such as ...
