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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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 ...
Like milk and cheese? How lactose tolerance spread through Europe 4,000 years ago
The human ability to digest the milk sugar lactose after infancy spread throughout Central Europe in only a few thousand ...
Viewpoint: 5 reasons you should be eating GMOs
Impossible Burger is a household name best recognized for its successful introduction of a plant-based burger that “bleeds” and has no ...
The mystery of the human butt
Take a look around the animal kingdom. Even our closest living relatives among the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas), ...
Evolution’s unpredictable dark side: Everything ‘natural’ is not always good
Given a choice, most people gravitate toward the natural over the artificial. After all, natural environments are preferable to garbage ...
When ‘bones and stones’ are not enough: Genetics fills in the blanks in the story of human evolution
In recent years, a field that has traditionally relied on fossil discoveries has acquired helpful new tools: genomics and ancient ...
Why do so many dogs eat human poop?
Molly, our beloved Labrador retriever, certainly loved to eat poop. Sometimes she would chow down on her own feces, and ...
Nature vs nurture? Why humans are the only animal that has genders
As gender theorists like Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling have pointed out, sex and gender cannot be fully pulled apart. Facts about our sexed ...
Podcast: Where do babies come from? How developmental genetics revealed the secrets of life’s earliest stages
In this episode we’re going back to the very beginning, telling the stories of the midwives of the field of ...
The woman who challenged 19th century conventional wisdom: Are females ‘biologically barred from success’?
One of the first women to scientifically debunk men's alleged superiority, [trailblazing psychologist Leta Stetter] Hollingworth’s research lent credibility to ...
Are facial expressions universal?
Faces depicted in sculptures crafted between 3,500 and 600 years ago in Mexico and Central America convey five varieties of ...
Wooly rhinos driven to extinction by climate change not human hunters
The reign of woolly rhinos, which lasted for millions of years, came to an abrupt end some 14,000 years ago, ...
Why beauty is genetically hardwired
Charles Darwin’s second book, following upon On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, has received far less attention than ...
Athletic evolution: Comparing modern athletes to ancestral warriors
Scholars have long argued that Neanderthal weapons were too hefty to hurl and, therefore, had to be thrust directly into ...
Rat magnets: Why did cats become attached to humans?
The exact relationship between early, semi-domesticated cats and humans isn’t clear cut. While there’s some evidence that people had personal ...
Behold the sturddlefish: ‘It’s like if a cow and a giraffe made a baby’
“Sturddlefish,” as these [Russian sturgeon and American paddlefish] hybrids were nicknamed after researchers in Hungary announced their creation last month, go shockingly ...
DNA shows Neanderthals mated with humans in two waves, not just once
[A]ncient humans mated with Neanderthals between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, well before the more recent, and better-known mixing of the two ...
Discovery of fire lit up human evolution. When did it occur?
Scientists suspect that without a control over fire, humans probably would never have developed large brains and the benefits that ...
Missing link: The complicated sex lives of ancient humans
Analysis of two Neanderthal genomes, one Denisovan genome, and four modern human genomes revealed new evidence of gene flow between ...
Dinosaur cancer? We suffer from malignancies that afflicted our distant biological relatives
[S]cientists say they have, for the first time, found that dinosaurs suffered from osteosarcoma -- an aggressive malignant cancer that ...
Why do humans mate in private? Instinct or morality?
A debate has emerged as to why humans mate in private while every other animal – except the Arabian babbler ...
Real life Jurassic Park? Recovered prehistoric DNA raises prospect of resurrecting species
Even before Jurassic Park became a staple of pop culture in the early 1990s, geneticists have been on the hunt ...
How humans might play a role in our own extinction
[W]hat if human extinction was less a cinematic scenario, and instead, a looming reality? That might seem like a sensational ...
Origins of life: We are getting closer to recreating the bubbling primordial soup
At 158 degrees Fahrenheit (70 degrees Celsius), the vents are a bit hot for a bubble bath but, it turns ...
Indigenous people remained in southeastern US for nearly 150 years, study shows
While [expeditions by Spanish explorers] unquestionably resulted in the deaths of countless Indigenous people and the relocation of remaining tribes, ...
How the Hobbit films illustrate the way human brains evolved
For Northwestern University neuroscientist and engineer Malcolm MacIver, [a scene from the Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey where Gandalf and Bilbo ...
