The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

The human genome is a rich, complex record of migration, encounters, and inheritance written over thousands of millennia.

Most people alive today carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. Now scientists are gaining a more intimate ...

Human evolution has often been depicted as a process of adaptation, where natural selection and genetic changes drive species toward better-suited traits for survival in their environments. But this ...

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 ...

Long before humans became master hunters, our ancestors were already thriving by making the most of what nature left behind. New research suggests that scavenging animal carcasses wasn’t a desperate ...

The museum’s groundbreaking Hall of Human Origins centers around the adaptations that set early humans apart Jack Tamisiea What does it mean to be human? This question, deceptively simple and imbued ...

Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection.

Important, previously unrecognized genetic changes common to all ancient and modern Homo sapiens spread in Africa more than 300,000 years ago, a new study finds. After that, the same investigation ...

A new study in the journal Science reveals that interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans was strongly sex-biased. This social dynamic explains why Neanderthal DNA is missing from our X chromosome ...