In the last decade, archaeologists have learned to read the genetic traces that ancient humans and Neanderthals left not only ...

Human evolution’s biggest mystery, which emerged 15 years ago from a 60,000-year-old pinkie finger bone, finally started to ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

In the winter of 1829, Dutch-Belgian anthropologist Philippe-Charles Schmerling discovered a fossil in a cave in Engis, Belgium — what looked like the partial skull of a small child. Schmerling is ...

Knowing how human DNA changes over generations is essential to estimating genetic disease risks and understanding how we evolved. But some of the most changeable regions of our DNA have been ...

This research introduces a novel method for inferring DNA methylation patterns in non-skeletal tissues from ancient specimens, providing new insights into human evolution. As DNA methylation is a key ...

Scientists at the University of Vienna, Austria, have screened great ape specimens obtained from natural history museums to identify DNA viruses. This groundbreaking study provides unique insights ...

DNA is the molecular basis of heredity, the inherited traits that pass between generations in a person's family tree. Embodied in the sequence of base pairs, DNA carries information between ...

Gut bacteria rapidly adapt to processed food additives, revealing how modern diets can reshape microbial evolution worldwide.