Evidence is mounting that the evolution of our species is more convoluted than we imagined — more like a braided stream than a branching tree. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...

To Shakespeare’s Hamlet we humans are “the paragon of animals”. But recent advances in genetics are suggesting that humans are far from being evolution’s greatest achievement. For example, humans have ...

A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, finds that the relatively high rate of Autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in ...

Humans evolved large brains and flat faces at a surprisingly rapid pace compared to other apes, likely reflecting the evolutionary advantages of these traits, finds a new analysis of ape skulls by UCL ...

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 ...

"Consciousness," although challenging to define, can be thought of as a first-person awareness of one's surroundings and oneself. You sense the world through your eyes, nose, ears and hands, and track ...

In 1758, Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus gave humans a scientific name: Homo sapiens, which means "wise human" in Latin. Although Linnaeus grouped humans with other apes, it was English biologist ...

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. If I tried to recap all the new fossils, new methods and ...

Unlike Mowgli, humans, in general, aren’t believed to have been raised by animals, although some of them are regarded as close genetic cousins. Chimpanzees, for instance. About 40 miles southeast of ...

Taking a snippet of genetic code that is unique to humans and inserting it into mice helps the animals to grow bigger brains than usual, according to a report out in Nature today 1. The slice of code ...

Is God a singular, independent being? Or just an evolved projection of human's theory of what God should be? Slate's Jesse Bering finds himself asking these heady questions after an analysis of how ...