Discover the latest news, features and articles about the origin of the human species and what makes us different from our ...

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 ...

Human newborns arrive remarkably underdeveloped. The reason lies in a deep evolutionary trade-off between big brains, bipedalism and the limits of motherhood.

Many people today simply assume that our evolution has quietly ended with the development of the modern human. It's easy to think that medicine, science, and modern living have made us "perfect" or ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

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 ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution finds that the relatively high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in the past. The paper is titled "A general ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...

Throughout most of human history, evolution progressed slowly. Small genetic changes took thousands of years to permeate populations. Natural selection was intentional, reactive, and gradual. However, ...

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.