Ancient DNA is turning human prehistory into something startlingly intimate. Instead of a clean handoff from one species to another, the last 50,000 years look more like a long, tangled story of ...

Once thought primitive, we now know Neanderthals were intelligent and even interbred with modern humans—many people today carry some Neanderthal DNA. Turns out, a lot of our jokes against our ...

I have spent years covering discoveries that nudge our origin story around the edges, but the sequencing of DNA from one of the very last Neanderthals does something different: it rewrites the center ...

The Neanderthal Connection Every person alive today carries traces of Neanderthal DNA, typically around 2% of their genome. This genetic legacy comes from interbreeding events between Homo sapiens and ...

Every face carries a story, shaped long before birth by a quiet choreography of genes switching on and off at just the right moment. A new study suggests that part of that story reaches far back into ...

For centuries, we’ve imagined Neanderthals as distant cousins — a separate species that vanished long ago. But thanks to AI-powered genetic research, scientists have revealed a far more entangled ...

Scientists may have uncovered a surprising link between a painful brain condition and the DNA we inherited from our ancient Neanderthal relatives. Modern humans may owe more to Neanderthals than just ...

New research suggests a genetic dynamic that may have contributed to Neanderthals' extinction. Neanderthal-Museum, Mettmann CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons Did interbreeding between humans and ...

Every human face is unique, allowing us to distinguish between individuals. We know little about how facial features are encoded in our DNA, but we may be able to learn more about how our faces ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. When scientists sequenced the Neanderthal genome in 2010, they learned that Neanderthals ...