“Modern humans were essentially like waves crashing on a beach, slowly but steadily eroding the beach away.” With this vivid simile, Princeton geneticist Joshua Akey describes a process that, until ...

Every time you look in the mirror, you are seeing the legacy of an extinct cousin. A small but influential fraction of your ...

Scientists have long debated how modern humans evolved. For decades, most researchers agreed that Homo sapiens came from one ancestral group in Africa, dating back 200,000 to 300,000 years. But new ...

The discovery of ancient human cousins has long stirred wonder and debate. Early Neanderthal remains offered a glimpse into our distant past, prompting questions about how they lived and whether they ...

"Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue on some items through these links." Two 7,000-year-old mummies from the Takarkori rock shelter in the Sahara have been found to be from a ...

Ancient DNA reveals that childhood viruses lived with humans for thousands of years, reshaping how we understand human and ...

Researchers have reconstructed ancient herpesvirus genomes from Iron Age and medieval Europeans, revealing that HHV-6 has ...

Discover evidence of ancient hominins coexisting with early humans in Indonesia 200,000 years ago. A groundbreaking find for ...

In a spectacular bit of science, a group of scientists has sequenced the DNA from the femur of a man who died 45,000 years ago. The femur they studied is over 20 times older than this 2000 year old ...