The Indigenous peoples of the Bolivian highlands are survivors. For thousands of years they have lived at altitudes of more than two miles, where oxygen is about 35 percent lower than at sea level.

Ancient DNA is turning human evolution into a crime scene reconstruction, and one of the prime suspects is a herpesvirus that ...

One of the biggest mysteries in human evolution has just been solved. In 2010, a groundbreaking genetic analysis revealed that east Asia was once home to a previously unknown group of enigmatic ...

Researchers have reconstructed ancient herpesvirus genomes from Iron Age and medieval Europeans, revealing that HHV-6 has been infecting humans for at least 2,500 years. Some people inherited the ...

A collection of bones from Casablanca holds important new clues to the origins of modern humans and Neanderthals.

Discover evidence of ancient hominins coexisting with early humans in Indonesia 200,000 years ago. A groundbreaking find for ...

Evidence is mounting that the evolution of our species is more convoluted than we imagined — more like a braided stream than a branching tree. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn ...

Denisovans, a mysterious human relative, left behind far more than a handful of fossils—they left genetic fingerprints in modern humans across the globe. Multiple interbreeding events with distinct ...

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 ...

When Charles Darwin first proposed how evolution works in 1859, it seemed plausible. Tiny changes stack up over time, eventually leading a species to become something entirely different. Aside from ...