This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from ...

The origins of human language remain mysterious. Are we the only animals truly capable of complex speech? Are Homo sapiens the only hominids who could give detailed directions to a far-off freshwater ...

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe. Using advanced analysis based ...

A new study suggests that the NOVA1 gene may have been a key player in the evolution of human language. By Carl Zimmer Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe. Using advanced analysis based ...

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 ...

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 ...

Two of the traits that set modern humans apart from non-human primates are taller stature and a higher basal metabolic rate. Researchers have identified a genetic variant that contributed to the ...

Ph.D. candidate Yuchen Lian (LIACS) wants to understand why human languages look the way they do—and find inspiration to ...

A lost chapter in human evolution has been revealed after an analysis of modern DNA found that we come from not one but two ancestral populations—ones that drifted apart and later reconnected long ...