Studying human evolution involves piecing together scattered clues about how we survived against tough odds. One of the biggest mysteries is understanding how large or small ancient human populations ...

“The fact that we can reconstruct events from hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago just by looking at DNA today is astonishing,” stated Aylwyn Scally of Cambridge University. That sums up ...

For decades, the dominant theory in human evolution suggested that modern humans descended from a single ancestral lineage in Africa. However, groundbreaking new research from the University of ...

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe. Using advanced analysis based ...

Discover the latest news, features and articles about the origin of the human species and what makes us different from our ...

A novel genetic model suggests that the ancestors of modern humans came from two distinct populations that split and reconnected during our evolutionary history. When you purchase through links on our ...

More than a decade after the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, scientists are still working to understand how human-specific DNA changes shaped human evolution. It's just over a decade since ...

Fossils from a Moroccan cave have been dated with remarkable accuracy to about 773,000 years ago, thanks to a magnetic signature locked into the surrounding sediments. The hominin remains show a blend ...

Humans were living in rainforests roughly 150,000 years ago, some 80,000 years earlier than was previously thought—and may have been an important center for early human evolution. This is the ...