A deer rib pulled from an ancient butchery site in central China carried an unexpected clue. Inside the bone, calcite ...

When our distant ancestors first traded nomadic life for farming, villages, and permanent homes, you might assume that the beastly forces of natural selection lost their ability to shape our species, ...

Plus: Neuralink's second trial with a human patient appears to have been a success This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the ...

A massive study of ancient DNA from nearly 16,000 people across more than 10,000 years in West Eurasia reveals that natural selection has shaped modern human genomes far more than previously thought.

The turn of the next millennium is still a long way off, but that hasn't stopped scientists from simulating what future human evolution might look like when the year 3000 hits. The result? A computer ...

A new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...

Some 4,000 years ago, as ancient civilizations such as the Minoans in Crete and the Neo-Sumerian Empire in Mesopotamia were shaping cultures in Europe and the Middle East, human biology itself was ...

Throughout most of human history, evolution progressed slowly. Small genetic changes took thousands of years to permeate populations. Natural selection was intentional, reactive, and gradual. However, ...