evolution
Bizarre deep sea microbe could help explain origins of ‘animals, plants, fungi and humans’
Two billion years ago, simple cells gave rise to far more complex cells. Biologists have struggled for decades to learn ...
Extinct human ancestor Homo erectus evolved in Africa—not Asia—new fossil study suggests
Homo erectus reached the Indonesian island of Java at some point between 1.3 million to 1.5 million years ago, according ...
How did early humans avoid being wiped out by tuberculosis?
Tuberculosis is responsible for as many as one billion deaths in the last 200 years alone, but its murderous history ...
Can we add ‘cooking’ to the list of things that drove human evolution?
Theories about the driving forces of evolutionary differentiation that separated us from our ape relatives are not lacking. Toolmaking, predisposition to ...
Past decade taught us how wrong we were about human evolution, including when our ancestors left Africa
In recent years, anthropologists around the world have discovered new human ancestors, figured out what happened to the Neanderthals, and pushed ...
Podcast: Why some of the most iconic images and stories depicting evolution are wrong
Kat Arney tackles the myths and misconceptions around two of the most iconic images in evolutionary biology: the 'March of ...
Deeper understanding of our ‘sense of touch’ could lead to better prostheses
Imagine you’re holding a pen by the tip-side in between your thumb and index finger. You close your eyes and ...
Genetic analysis reshapes our understanding of when humans first arrived in North America
For more than half a century, the prevailing story of how the first humans came to the Americas went like ...
How whales got so big eating tiny krill. And why they don’t get bigger
Pound for pound, the blue whale’s reign is indisputable. At around 100 feet long and 100 tons in size, these ...
Prehistoric ‘chewing gum’ contains Neolithic girl’s DNA, allowing scientists to reconstruct her face
Scientists in Denmark have squeaked out an entire human genome from a prehistoric piece of “chewing gum.” Made from birch ...
Podcast: Latest discoveries in genetics, archaeology reveal early history of the British people
What's the real story behind the romantic myths about the Celts? And what can modern genetic and anthropological techniques tell ...
Our ancestors may have evolved the ability to talk 27 million years earlier than we thought
Some scientists have theorized that it only became physically possible to speak a wide range of essential vowel sounds when ...
Tracing evolution of mammalian hearing: Essential ear bones were once part of the jaw
One hundred and twenty million years ago, when northeastern China was a series of lakes and erupting volcanoes, there lived ...
How ancient humans ‘self-domesticated’ their own faces to appear more friendly
One hypothesis for how humans transitioned from developing a robust Neandertal visage in maturity to retaining finer features throughout life ...
‘Genome streamlining’: How species ditch genes no longer needed for survival
Can a genome reach maximum efficiency? ...
Your dog may be paying closer attention to your words than you realize
Dogs pay much closer attention to what humans say than we realised, even to words that are probably meaningless to ...
Was it ‘bad luck’—not ancient humans—that drove Neanderthals to extinction?
Neanderthals may have gone extinct due to chance, and not, as some researchers previously thought, due to competition for resources ...
Viewpoint: Pest resistance to GMO crops is a real threat, but no reason to avoid biotechnology
Central to the criticism of genetically modified crops is the fear that weeds and pests may develop resistance .... The ...
Is frozen 18,000-year-old puppy missing link between wolves and dogs?
An 18,000-year-old puppy unearthed in Siberia could prove to be the missing link between dogs and wolves, scientists believe. The puppy ...
First plants didn’t evolve flower color to attract pollinators, study suggests
Flowering plants feature a wondrous array of colors, the primary purpose of which is to attract insect pollinators. But this ...
Unfolding the mystery of carnivorous plants opens door to producing more sustainable crops
The secret recipe nature uses to make the diverse leaf shapes we see everywhere around us has been revealed in ...
First plants that moved from water to land were natural GMOs, research reveals
Natural genetic engineering allowed plants to move from water to land, according to a new study by an international group ...
Why it’s so challenging to determine ‘how and when’ humans first set foot in the Americas
A deluge of new findings are challenging long-held scientific narratives of how humans came to North and South America ...
This ancient ape may tell us when our ancestors started walking on two legs
Fossils of a newly-discovered ancient ape could give clues to how and when walking on two legs evolved. The ability ...
Can computers develop human-like intelligence by imitating our own evolutionary path?
Evolutionary algorithms have been around for a long time. Traditionally, they’ve been used to solve specific problems. In each generation, ...
Paper popular with creationists retracted 30 years after publication
A paper by a Russian researcher who has been dogged by allegations of fraud has been retracted, 30 years to ...
Chicxulub asteroid impact sparked mammal growth surge, fossil ‘trove’ shows
After an asteroid crashed into what is now Chicxulub, Mexico 66 million years ago, a chain of events occurred that ...
