We now have only the second high-quality genome from an ancient Denisovan human, which reveals there were more populations of ...

Lead is a powerful neurotoxin that disrupts the growth and function of both brain and body. There is no safe level of lead exposure, and even the smallest traces can impair memory, learning and ...

A crushed ancient skull may hold clues to the origins of ancient humans. Digital reconstruction of a crushed skull from an ancient human relative could rewrite the timeline of human evolution, ...

Plague, leprosy, smallpox and other diseases didn't jump from animals to humans when we thought. Ancient DNA is revealing ...

Ancient, fossilized teeth, uncovered during a decades-long archaeology project in northeastern Ethiopia, indicate that two different kinds of hominins, or human ancestors, lived in the same place ...

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 ...

Learn more about the human tailbone and how, even though we may not have a strict need for it anymore, it still helps us with ...

A mitochondrial DNA study points to at least two waves of migration linking the Americas, China, and Japan- one during the ...

Recent advances in ancient DNA analysis have sparked intriguing discussions about the possibility of non-human entities once ruling the Earth. While such claims challenge the boundaries of ...

In an excerpt from his new book Dinner with King Tut, Sam Kean explores a weird and wild '90s experiment to replicate ancient ...