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 ...

When scientists found the skull, named Yunxian 2, they assumed it belonged to an earlier ancestor of ours, Homo erectus, the ...

What will humans be like generations from now in a world transformed by artificial intelligence (AI)? Plenty of thinkers have applied themselves to questions like this, considering how AI will alter ...

The story of how us humans—and other mammals—got our noses may have just gotten more complicated. This is the conclusion of a new study by researchers from Japan who have studied how the face develops ...

Volcanic eruptions are excellent timekeepers because they happen very quickly, geologically speaking. As hot magma erupts, it ...

A deformed human skull discovered over thirty years ago in central China is now upending what researchers believed they ...

Microbes supporting the production of more metabolic energy could be key to the evolution of large brains First study to show gut microbes from different animal species shape variations in their ...

How did humans evolve brains capable of complex language, civilization, and more? The answer could lie in exceptional DNA. Scientists at UC San Francisco have found that parts of our chromosomes have ...

Stanford study finds rapid brain cell evolution boosted human cognition but lowered autism gene activity, raising vulnerability.

Human societies have long depended on the division of labor to thrive—walk into any town, and you can probably find bakers baking bread, truck drivers driving that bread to market and grocers selling ...

About 360 million years ago, our fishy ancestors moved from water to land. Along the way, their fins turned into feet, with toes.