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.
‘From pipsqueaks to titans’: The complicated evolution of dinosaurs
For tens of millions of years, even as other dinosaur species grew to huge sizes, 40-foot carnivores weren't around. How, ...
We’re still searching for a key piece of our evolutionary tree—our most recent ancestor
Humans’ most recent ancestor, the species that predated our kind, remains shrouded in mystery. Anthropologists still don’t know what species ...
Podcast: Tracing humanity’s roots: uncovering history and genetic diversity in Africa
We explore the genetic diversity in the birthplace of humanity and discover the cultural and historical stories written in the ...
Invading armies not to blame for fall of ancient Andean cultures, genetic analysis shows
An international team has conducted what it says is the first in-depth, wide-scale study of the genomic history of ancient ...
Why were these 1,000-year-old skulls shaped like ‘sci-fi aliens’?
Tight wrapping in childhood produced deliberately deformed skulls ...
Skeletons of Africans enslaved in Mexico reveal extreme hardships of the Atlantic slave trade
In a study published [April 30] in the journal Current Biology, scientists tell the stories of three 16th-century enslaved Africans ...
Dinosaur DNA discovered?
The tiny fossil is unassuming, as dinosaur remains go. ... But it may contain something never before seen from the ...
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 ...
