In 2001 scientists studying human language made a breakthrough: by looking at the DNA of a family with a rare speech disability, they found that a mutation in a single gene called FOXP2 were ...

Learn why Neanderthals were likely stronger than us, and that they likely weren't brutes.

The familiar claim about humans evolving from apes leaves out an important part of the story. Fossils and DNA reveal a much more complicated family history than the popular version suggests.

For decades, scientists believed modern humans came from one main ancestral group in Africa, an idea known as the 'Out of Africa' model. But new DNA research suggests the story may be far more ...

The Jidao Paleolithic site group in Fusui county, Chongzuo city, south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, is the ...

For years, the dominant explanation for human evolution suggested that modern humans descended from a single ancestral population in Africa. While scientists have long agreed that Homo sapiens ...

Scientists have uncovered a surprising new picture of human origins that challenges the long-held idea of a single ancestral population in Africa. By analyzing genetic data from diverse modern African ...

More than 400,000-year-old Homo erectus teeth from China may reveal a surprising link between this ancient human species, Denisovans, and some modern people. Scientists found protein mutations ...

Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living ...

UC Berkeley researchers have identified regions of DNA that humans inherited from two unknown ancestors as a result of long-ago interbreeding among modern humans and at least four other archaic human ...

Most of what we knew about early modern humans has been turned upside down in the past two decades – and many more questions ...