TIME: Much of what you write about in the book involves the idea of “dispersal” as an evolutionary process that could dramatically change the human species. Describe what you mean by that. Scharf: ...

More than a decade after the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, scientists are still working to understand how human-specific DNA changes shaped human evolution. It's just over a decade since ...

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 ...

Scientists have uncovered new evidence suggesting that autism may have it roots in how the human brain has evolved. "Our results suggest that some of the same genetic changes that make the human brain ...

Why are 90% of people right-handed and 10% left-handed? A modification of the well-known fighting hypothesis aims to explain this pattern.

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Ten fossil teeth belong to new Australopithecus species Found in Afar Region, they are 2.65 million years old This species coexisted with an early Homo species Fossils underscore complex nature of ...

Long before humans became master hunters, our ancestors were already thriving by making the most of what nature left behind. New research suggests that scavenging animal carcasses wasn’t a desperate ...

Researchers found that ancient hominids—including early humans—were exposed to lead throughout childhood, leaving chemical traces in fossil teeth. Experiments suggest this exposure may have driven ...

Recent research has unveiled an unexpected link between the ancient human exposure to lead and the evolutionary development of our brains. This groundbreaking study, conducted by scientists at Arizona ...