Over the past 10,000 years, evolution in West Eurasia has been selecting for light skin, red hair and resistance to HIV and ...

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 ...

Data from more than 15,000 ancient people reveal natural selection of hundreds of genes linked to immunity, skin tone, ...

The human body is full of evolutionary compromises. The loss of the tail may be one of the clearest examples of how change ...

Saliva is a bodily fluid most of us take for granted despite the significant roles it plays: aiding in digestion, maintaining strong teeth and defending against oral disease. However, the evolution of ...

Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection.

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

The human body is often described as a marvel of "perfect design": elegant, efficient and finely tuned for its purpose. Yet, ...

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 ...

The human body is a machine whose many parts – from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, eyes, liver and brain – have been assembled in fits and starts over the four billion years of our ...

Frequent burn exposure may have driven human genetic adaptations that improve healing but worsen severe injury outcomes.