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 ...

Most animals straightforwardly inherit their genetic material. DNA passes from parent to offspring, generation after generation, creating the biological continuity that links families, populations and ...

Genes aren't just transferred from parents to their offspring. Nature has found other ways to pass on genetic information, even between different species. And a new study, published in the journal ...

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 ...

What makes the human brain distinctive? A new study published in Cell identifies two genes linked to human brain features and provides a road map to discover many more. The research could lead to ...

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 ...

Some 4,000 years ago, as ancient civilizations such as the Minoans in Crete and the Neo-Sumerian Empire in Mesopotamia were shaping cultures in Europe and the Middle East, human biology itself was ...

Applying new analytic methods to nearly 16,000 ancient genomes reveals natural selection has acted on hundreds, not dozens, of genes in West Eurasia over the last 10,000 years. More than half of the ...