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.
A different approach to finding alien life: What if ET breathes hydrogen instead of oxygen?
The first time we find evidence of life on a planet orbiting another star (an exoplanet), it is probably going ...
‘Crazy beast’ fossil shows how weird evolution can get
Researchers have uncovered the fossil of an early mammal named the "crazy beast" that lived 66 million years ago on ...
Coronavirus evolutionary tree can illuminate pandemic’s ‘past, present and possible future’
For anyone who knows how to look, the past, present, and possible futures of the new coronavirus can be found ...
7 things we learned about human evolution in the past decade, including that we are older than we thought
To mark the 10th anniversary of the Smithsonian’s “David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins,” here are some of the ...
‘Genetic scrambling’ over millions of years makes it difficult to understand Earth’s earliest life
Biologists have long hoped to understand the nature of the earliest living organisms on Earth. If they could, they might ...
‘Overly simplistic’: Women may have been more than just ‘gatherers’ in ancient times, studies suggest
Sexual divisions of labor characterized ancient societies, but were not as rigidly enforced as has often been assumed, [two] new ...
Seeking the ‘secret ingredient’ that led to life on Earth. Researchers may have discovered it
Think of the RNA world as a pot of gazpacho. We prepare ingredients and then stir them into a single ...
Podcast: Twisted history—The true story of how the DNA double helix was discovered
There's more to the story of the double helix than Watson and Crick. We unwind history to uncover some of ...
‘Not alone’: 3 different human ancestors may have lived together in South Africa 2 million years ago
An international team, including Arizona State University researcher Gary Schwartz, have unearthed the earliest known skull of Homo erectus, the ...
Puzzling over the mysteries of human pregnancy: Why is labor so long and dangerous?
From an evolutionary perspective, human pregnancy is quite strange, says University at Buffalo biologist Vincent Lynch. "For example, we don't ...
Part of the forensic ‘jigsaw puzzle’: Tooth shape offers insights into a deceased person’s genetic makeup
A study found that some characteristics of dental remains — such as crown groove patterns, cusp size, number of roots, ...
Why ‘beauty’ is an evolutionary conundrum that even Darwin couldn’t solve
The genius of evolution is its brutal pragmatism; do whatever is needed to pass your genes onto the next generation ...
Video: Exploring the natural events that created the coronavirus pandemic
The coronavirus pandemic has changed our day-to-day life as we know it – but how did the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) ...
Language evolved 25 million years ago, monkey brain study suggests
Curious about how people started talking, researchers from the UK scanned the monkey species and the brains of the people ...
Gods of genetic engineering: With the end of ‘Homo sapiens naturalis’ approaching, what is our place in nature?
Our society has evolved so much, can we still say that we are part of Nature? If not, should we ...
If we have difficulty defining ‘life’ on earth, how will we identify it on other planets?
What does it mean to be alive? Science, shockingly, still doesn’t have a consensus. For example, is it fair to ...
Viewpoint: Human ‘evolutionary changes’ inevitable from pandemics
We all know that viruses are living organisms that can evolve and change, but did you also know that they ...
Massive genetic analysis shows how our ancestors ‘diversified, migrated and mixed’ around the world
A new study has provided the most comprehensive analysis of human genetic diversity to date, after the sequencing of 929 ...
Making the case for a ‘semi-aquatic’ phase in human evolution
For the past 150 years, scientists and laypeople alike have accepted a “savanna” scenario of human evolution. The theory, primarily ...
‘Like trying to hit a moving target’: Why it’s so difficult to attack cancer with targeted gene therapies
We are, it seems, still a long way off from a cure, in any ordinary sense of the term. Yet ...
Mysterious African skull could be part of undiscovered ‘ghost population’
A mysterious but well-preserved hominid skull found nearly a century ago comes from a population that lived in Africa around ...
Targeting cancer cells by ‘putting the brakes’ on their ability to mutate and evolve
The vast majority of cancer deaths in the US come about not because of a lack of treatment, but because ...
Discovery of microbes under ocean floor suggests life could thrive in ‘extreme environments’ like Mars
When scientists find microbial life thriving in some of the most extreme environments on Earth, it gives them hope that ...
Searching for signs of Earth’s earliest life more than ‘a needle-in-the-haystack’ problem
The search for signs of Earth’s earliest forms of life isn’t quite like looking for dinosaur bones protruding out from ...
Origins of symmetry: This ancient worm-like creature may be a key to our own evolution
A worm-like creature that burrowed on the seafloor more than 500 million years ago may be key to the evolution ...
Strange cave-fellows? Unexpected discovery suggests 3 early human species lived together in South Africa
Two million years ago, three different early humans—Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the earliest-known Homo erectus—appear to have lived at the same time in ...
Bronze age gender inequality? Analysis of 2,500-year-old teeth shows different diets for boys and girls
Analysing 2500-year-old teeth has thrown open a window onto life and gender inequality during Bronze Age China. The University of ...
