Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

Combining archaeological evidence with ancient DNA and data on past climates shows us how long and winding the story of human ...

The idea that modern humans inherited DNA from Neanderthal ancestors is one of the 21st century’s most celebrated discoveries in evolution. It may not be that ...

A just-published article in the journal Nature—“Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia,” (Akbari et al, 15 April 2026)—describes how the development of agriculture in ...

Natural selection has long been considered the driving force behind human evolution. But a landmark study of 87 fossil skulls spanning the past two million years suggests the story is far more complex ...

It is generally accepted by archaeologists that modern humans originated in Africa and dispersed worldwide, while other hominins went extinct. Yet how and when Homo sapiens dispersed out of Africa, ...

All living things have DNA made from the same four building blocks, called nucleotides. This is a strong clue that all life came from the same starting point. Fields like anatomy, biochemistry, ...

A new study has uncovered evidence that early human ancestors were using fire in South Africa's Wonderwerk Cave between 1.07 and 1.79 million years ago, extending the chronology of one of the earliest ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution finds that the relatively high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in the past. The paper is titled "A general ...

In the early days of such debates ... writers argued that an enormous number of individually unlikely steps were required to produce something very like a human being, a "humanoid"; that the chances ...