For decades, a neat story about human origins has floated through textbooks and documentaries: modern humans emerged in East Africa, then spread south later. It’s clean, familiar, and easy to repeat.

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 ...

Researchers have significantly expanded the catalogue of known human genetic variation. The resulting datasets, shared in two back-to-back publications in the journal Nature, constitute what may be ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. A reconstruction of the crushed skull labelled Yunxian 2, which has features that are closer to species thought to have existed ...

Renaud Joannes-Boyau receives funding from the Australian Research Council. Manish Arora receives funding from US National Institutes of Health. He is the founder of Linus Biotechnology, a start-up ...

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 ...

RABAT — A newly announced fossil discovery is further cementing Morocco’s central place in the prehistory of humanity. On Jan. 7, Moroccan and international researchers revealed the unearthing of ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A handful of teeth found at ...