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.
What happened to the native Caribbeans? Ancient DNA could solve mystery
The Bahamas weren’t settled until 1,500 years ago. The people who settled there are known as the Lucayan Taino, and ...
Fossil-like traces found on Mars—How can we know if this is biological life?
In early January, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover came across what some researchers thought might be trace fossils on Mars. ... A strictly ...
Viewpoint: Rethinking scientist Richard Dawkins’ classic book ‘The Selfish Gene’
Richard Dawkins’ 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which topped a poll last year for the most inspiring science books of all ...
Bugs as food? They may have played a role in our evolution
Editor's note: Darcy Shapiro is an evolutionary anthropologist at Rutgers University Did you know that what your ancestors ate affects your ...
Genetic engineering will ensure that human evolution will continue–for better or worse
Editor's note: Scott Solomon is an associate teaching professor in the department of BioSciences at Rice University [Feb. 12 was] Charles Darwin's ...
Evolution of walking: Primitive fish shows key nerves appeared 20 million years before land animals
The genes and nerve cells that allow people and other mammals to walk around can also be found in a ...
Extraterrestrial life may have different chemistry, but evolutionary forces will be Earth-like
If the forces of natural selection have shaped the development of life on Earth, there's no reason to believe those ...
Archaeologist skeptics reject evidence humans settled Americas 130,000 years ago
When researchers made the astonishing suggestion last year that early humans settled the Americas 100,000 years earlier than thought, they asked doubters ...
First Britons had dark skin, DNA ear scraps found in 10,000 year-old ‘Cheddar Man’ reveal
The earliest Britons were black-skinned, with dark curly hair and possibly blue eyes, new analysis of a 10,000-year-old Somerset skeleton ...
Charred ‘digging sticks’ found in Italy could be oldest Neanderthal tools made with fire
In the spring of 2012, while digging a hole for a thermal pool, construction workers in Grosseto, Italy, hit scientific ...
Stone artifacts in India spark new questions about when and how humans developed tools
Sometime around 400,000 years ago human ancestors went on an innovation bender. No longer content to make do with only the large ...
Speech mystery: Language relies on brain pathways that predate human beings
New research has identified the brain systems involved in language learning and discovered that these systems pre-date the human species ...
Did life begin in water—or some other liquid?
[W]hile water is an indispensable solvent for all known life forms that exist today, water also inhibits the formation of ...
Ancient Eurasian DNA helps untangle humanity’s twisted family tree
Advances in ancient DNA sequencing are shedding light on the genetic links between our Stone Age ancestors and modern humans, ...
Viewpoint: Racism rather than ‘race’ better explains racial disparities in addiction and other diseases
[T]he assumption that health disparities are caused by race rather than racism permeates more subtly in the practices of many ...
Evolution of modern human behavior linked to the rounding of our brains
In a study published [January 24] in Science Advances, researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology announced that the earliest Homo sapiens did ...
Human Cell Atlas: The quest to build biology’s periodic table
Realizing the need and potential for an atlas of all human cells, two scientists, Aviv Regev and Sarah Teichmann, have ...
Unique mix of brain chemicals separates humans from other primates
A team of researchers has now used a novel technique to form a hypothesis on the origins of our rich ...
Earliest human relative? Mystery and controversy surround 7-million-year-old femur
When anthropologists meet in France at the end of January, one of the most provocative fossils in the study of ...
Rewriting human history: Fossils discovered in Israel suggest earlier departure from Africa
A small bit of human jawbone found in Israel has been dated to between 177,000 and 194,000 years ago. Before ...
Viewpoint: ‘Scientific racism’ and eugenics are infiltrating legitimate science again
Researchers with extreme views on race number relatively few but, having languished on the margins of their fields for many ...
Marrying close relatives offers genetic risks and benefits for offspring
Endogamy is a powerful but controversial cultural tool. It also can play surprising roles in health and disease ...
Video: Ancient virus could explain how human memories are formed
The particulars surrounding how our memory works has baffled neuroscientists for decades. Turns out, it’s a very sophisticated process involving ...
Searching for alien life: Maybe we should start with extraterrestrial viruses
One possibility for what might be out there that’s, relatively speaking, one of the most plausible theories has so far ...
111-year old mystery solved: Egyptian mummies from 2000 BCE are half-brothers, DNA analysis shows
Two Egyptian mummies that rested next to each other for nearly 4,000 years are not full brothers, but rather half ...
Singing the praises of the stick’s role in human evolution
Sticks are probably where the story of craft begins—the point at which our very distant ancestors progressed from animalistic existences ...
Stop blaming rats for the Black Death—humans may have spread the plague
Rats were not to blame for the spread of plague during the Black Death, according to a study. The rodents and ...
