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 populationsโas well as from those species from which humans share a common ancestryโwe can decipher our individual and collective past and develop medical innovations for the future.
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Video: Discovery of Homo naledi suggests โmaybe brain size isnโt all itโs cracked up to beโ when it comes to human evolution
The small brains of Homo naledi raise new questions about the evolution of human brain size. Big brains were costly ...
Humans lived in caves in Africa and used fire and tools as far as two million years ago
A large cave nestled in South Africaโs Kalahari Desert might be the first on Earth to have housed human activity, ...
Are rogue COVID variants ahead? โItโd be a brave person to say that the virus is nearing the end of its evolutionary routeโ
As the global infection count surges for a seventh consecutive week, after initial optimism that the pandemic had peaked, leading ...
3-D technology is reinventing paleoanthropology and the reconstruction of fossils
In 2018 a student excavator, Samantha Good, came upon the adult male skull of a Paranthropus robustus, lying upside down, ...
Viewpoint: A case for moderate exercise โ We get the most cognitive benefits by โperforming activities that we evolved to performโ
Your body clearly benefits from a daily moderate level of exercising. Does your brain care?ย Yes, your brain does pay ...
2.5 billion: Thatโs how many T. rexes may have roamed the Earth over their 3-million-year reign
On average, researchers estimate that some 20,000 T. rex lived at any one time and that about 127,000 generations of ...
Sharon Peacock: COVID-19 Variant Hunter
The UK is a world leader in sequencing SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Of all the coronavirus genomes that ...
Why humans evolved to be the sweatiest of the Great Apes
Humans have a uniquely high density of sweat glands embedded in their skin โ 10 times the density of chimpanzees ...
Debating the possible origins of COVID-19: A lab-escaped bioweapon? Animal poop? Random mutations of an existing virus?
โVirus outbreak: research says COVID-19 likely synthetic,โ shouted the headline in the Taipei Times on February 23, 2020. The idea ...
Not only did humans exchange DNA with Neanderthals โ we shared culture as well
Between ~45,000 to 40,000 years ago [humans and Neanderthals were] contemporaries and had ample time to meet and interact. New ...
Bad luck: How the world came close to sidestepping COVID-19
[SARS-CoV-2] almost didn't make it as a pandemic virus. Only bad luck and the packed conditions of the Huanan seafood ...
Personalized medicine: โRaceโ matters when it comes to genetic diseases and hard-wired drug responses
Although race is a social rather than biological construct, there are inherited genetic variations that play a role in drug ...
Humans are โsuper-predatorsโ hardwired by evolution to hunt our food sources into extinction
Humans are natural born killers: super-predators designed by evolution to subsist mainly on the meat and fat of large animals, ...
Worried that GMO seeds are bred in a lab? Theyโre not as unnatural as you think. 1 in 20 plants are naturally transgenic
Genetic modification is a process that sometimes happens naturally at the hands of bacteria, a new study concludes. Dozens of ...
โLucy the Human Chimpโ: Meet the chimpanzee raised with people and Janice, her caretaker, who tried to integrate her back into the wild
Lucy the Human Chimp, a new television documentary from HBO and Channel 4, explores... the story of one unique relationship: ...
The evolutionary history of human tolerance
Environmental pressures may have led humans to become more tolerant and friendly towards each other as the need to share ...
Natural GMOs: Plants and animals ‘steal genes’ from other species during process of evolution, mimicking transgenics
Little did biologist Gregor Mendelย know that his experiments with sweet peas in a monastery garden in Brno, Czech Republic, would ...
Getting high on hypoxia: Ancient humans went deep into caves in search of euphoria, and depicted the experience in their paintings
As archaeologist Yafit Kedar from Tel-Aviv University in Israel was in France enjoying some cave art deep within the ground, ...
Challenging evolutionary dogma: Is early human history solely linked to the southern African coast rich in marine resources?
The origins of modern humans and modern human cognition are thought to lie in southern Africa, as suggested by numerous ...
Podcast: Ezra Klein and Walter Isaacson discuss how CRISPR is poised to redirect the future course of evolution
When future generations look back on this moment in history, will they remember the daily political fights โ or will ...
Ancient humans mated with Neanderthals as recently as 45,000 years ago
Analyses of DNA found in human fossils from around [45,000 years ago] โ the oldest known human remains in Europe ...
Jurassic Park in real life? We have the technology to create โsuper exotic novel species,โ Neuralink co-founder claims
Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak, who started the brain-computer interface company with Elon Musk, has claimed that humans have the technology ...
Like meat? Early humans almost exclusively ate protein and hunted large animals for 2 million years
In a study recently published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, academics from Tel Aviv University in Israel and ...
โGreat ape-like brainsโ: Early humans who first ventured out of Africa 1.5 million years ago had ‘monkey brains’
Early humans still had great ape-like brains, according to a new study that found modern humans evolved to have our ...
The ancient origins of close friendships
Quite possibly, our strong desire for close friends evolved among our early ancestors because having a close friend improved oneโs ...
DNA of lettuce: How humans bred a weed into a favorite leafy vegetable over 6,000 years
Try to imagine a collection of 2500 different types of lettuce: approximately 1500 varieties that were ever grown by farmers ...
How mastering fire and cooking accelerated human evolution
Humanity's exceptional relationship with energy began hundreds of thousands of years ago, with our discovery of fire.ย Fire did much ...
