Ancestry & Evolution
Cold snap: How plummeting temperatures a million years ago almost killed off Europe’s earliest humans
A period of extreme cooling in western Europe may have driven away the continent’s earliest human species, researchers say ...
Talking Biotech Podcast: Kevin Folta talks with a crime lab expert on how DNA can solve cold cases
DNA has been an invaluable tool to make certain matches between a suspect and a crime. Since its early use ...
Skin vision: How bizarre hogfish that ‘sees with its skin’ can help us develop robotic limbs and self-driving cars
Without a mirror, it can be hard to tell if you're blushing, or have spinach in your teeth. But one ...
Challenging the Africa human origin hypothesis: Turkish fossils suggest apes and humans may have shared earlier European ancestry
Human and ape ancestors arose in Europe: A newly described fossil suggests that the ancestor of humans and apes arose ...
Science vs spirituality: The case of the severed head
There’s a ghastly severed head in St Robert’s Roman Catholic church, just down the road from me in Catforth, northern ...
Video: Glass see-through squid with ‘demon-like’ red eyes swims in the deep waters off the coast of Alaska
The see-through cephalopod was spotted by researchers exploring the deep sea surrounding Alaska's Aleutian Islands ...
Video: This extremely rare baby giraffe was born without spots
A baby giraffe was born at Brights Zoo in Limestone, Tennessee, without any patterns! Zoo director David Bright joins TODAY ...
Why can humans speak but monkeys can’t? It may be due to this one brain quirk
Speech is unique to humans, but most of the brain structures involved in speech production are also present in Old ...
What explains Homo sapiens’ huge brains? Ancient climate change played a role
Climate change may have contributed to the increase in the brain size of human ancestors, a new study suggests ...
Viewpoint: Bringing the mammoth back — Is it time to slow down de-extinction mania?
De-extinction is the science of restoring lost species and it has been in the news, sporadically, for decades ...
Infographic: Tree of Sex — Cataloging wild ways nature reproduces, from sex-changing fish to asexual lizards
From sex-changing fish to asexual lizards, these and many more species will be captured in a new sex database ...
Evolution of humor: Smiles are silent — so why do we hear laughter?
Laughter: Auditory signals were probably more effective in communicating feelings of mutual vulnerability during play ...
Why we overeat — and how studying voracious locusts may help us learn to curtail a dangerous human vice
This story starts in an unusual place for an article about human nutrition: a cramped, humid and hot room somewhere ...
Searching for answers: Why asking questions make us uniquely human
Evolution of propositional speech: Human self-consciousness is about generating justification systems for one's self and others ...
Cute canine head tilt: What are dogs thinking?
Canine behavior: research suggests the animals might cock their furry noggins when processing familiar words ...
‘Third human lineage’: Previously unknown human ancestor unearthed in China provokes speculation
In East China, specifically at the site called Hualongdong, scientists conducted an excavation and discovered fossils pointing to a possible ...
Podcast: Debating doppelgangers — How do two completely different people end up with the same face?
What can doppelgangers tell us about nature versus nurture? – podcast ...
Viewpoint: ‘Animal individualism’ ― Why picking and choosing which animal species should survive or die is a terrible idea
How should humans care for the beings that share the planet with us? This is one of the defining questions of ...
The Hidden Spring: Controversial new book addresses where consciousness originates
Viewpoint: Why and how does the subjective quality of experience arise from objective neurophysiological events? ...
Look into the past: Researchers recreate face of ‘oldest human’ with 45,000-year-old skull
Scientists have revealed the face of what may be the 'oldest human' to walk the Earth - a woman who ...
Questioning the miracle of life: How did an inanimate universe ‘create’ fire, water and humans?
How did an inanimate universe become animate? That question has been the cause of wars and the inspiration for many ...
What are the prospects that we might soon face another coronavirus-like viral pandemic?
There are signs of a mid-summer surge in COVID-19 cases, particularly in the Midwest and West, that have some experts ...
Viewpoint: ‘Instead of science and technology leading to post-humanism, perhaps it will lead to a slightly more human condition’
What it means to be human, then, is not a constant, but continually constituted, altered and re-constituted ...
This sheep has horns like a male — but a female reproductive system. Some animals are naturally intersex
In rare cases, humans can also be born with both male and female reproductive organs, and the same goes for ...
GLP podcast and video: How marriage impacted human evolution; ‘Tech bros’ back RFK, Jr. for president; Ban milk to slow climate change?
Marriage is a major milestone for many people, but how has the institution influenced human evolution? A growing list of ...
Characterizations of indigenous people as ‘savages’ and ‘monkeys’ permeate pop culture
Systemic racism and sexism have permeated civilization since the rise of agriculture, when people started living in one place for a long ...
How will humans make it through climate upheavals? Here’s how we’ve done it before
New research conducted by an international team, published in the journal Science, reveals that early human species were capable of ...