New research challenges long-standing assumptions about human evolution, revealing that natural selection has been more ...

When our distant ancestors first traded nomadic life for farming, villages, and permanent homes, you might assume that the ...

A glass of milk can still mark a line through humanity. For most adults, drinking it brings discomfort because the body ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising new picture of human origins that challenges the long-held idea of a single ancestral ...

Some researchers hold that evolution hasn’t much altered humans in the past 10,000 years. A new analysis of ancient DNA indicates that natural selection continued to shape hundreds of genes.

Some of the smallest organisms might have influenced our own evolutionary path. A new study has found that the distribution ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

A composite view of the Earth constructed by NASA from multiple satellite images Editor at Large Human evolution is a story writ slow. It’s been about 3.8 billion years since life on Earth emerged and ...

Prehistoric humans in Africa may have avoided areas infested with malaria-spreading mosquitoes, a new study suggests.

Long before humans spread across the globe, a deadly disease may have quietly shaped where our ancestors lived—and even how we evolved. New research reveals that malaria didn’t just threaten early ...

A massive study of ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 people across more than 10,000 years in West Eurasia reveals that natural selection has shaped modern human genomes far more than previously thought.

Angela Pelster is well-recognized in the literary community for her work. On April 14, she published her collection of essays ...