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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Everything that is alive today has evolved, including human beings. Our ancestors evolved many traits that helped them survive in ...

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 ...

Fossils from China's Chengjiang beds reveal that early vertebrate ancestors, jawless fish called myllokunmingids, possessed ...

The images above depict artificially-derived neurons grown in petri dishes, with a human neuron shown on the left. Artificially-derived chimpanzee neurons grow only one or two neurites (connecting ...

Building the human story based on a few artefacts is tricky – particularly for wooden tools that don’t preserve well, or cave ...

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 ...

Learn how repeated burn injuries may have acted as a form of natural selection, influencing human genes linked to healing and immune response.

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 ...