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 ...

Two of the traits that set modern humans apart from non-human primates are taller stature and a higher basal metabolic rate. Publishing in the Cell Press journal Cell Genomics on May 21, researchers ...

Modern humans descended from not one, but at least two ancestral populations that drifted apart and later reconnected, long before modern humans spread across the globe. Using advanced analysis based ...

A gene called ADSL, which helps synthesize DNA, differs between modern humans and our extinct human relatives. The findings could shed light on why Neanderthals vanished. When you purchase through ...

Outlining the problem / P. A. Mellars, M. J. Aitken and C. B. Stringer -- Uranium-series dating and the origin of modern man / Henry P. Schwarcz -- Luminescence dating relevant to human origins / M. J ...

THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. In pursuit of knowledge, the evolution of humanity ranks with the origins of life and the universe. And yet, except ...

Scientists have long debated how modern humans evolved. For decades, most researchers agreed that Homo sapiens came from one ancestral group in Africa, dating back 200,000 to 300,000 years. But new ...

Humans were isolated in southern Africa for about 100,000 years, which caused them to "fall outside the range of genetic variation" seen in modern-day people, a new genetic study reveals. The finding ...

Foreword / by Joseph O. Vogel -- Modern human origins : a people without history -- Historical perspectives : the place of humans in nature -- The palaeoenvironmental context : the origin and ...

Far from being a simple, straight-line evolution, human history is a tangled web of ancient love stories. Newly uncovered genetic evidence suggests our ancestors didn’t just mate with ...

John Gowlett receives funding from PAST Africa and Wenner-Gren Foundation, and his work has previously been supported by The Leverhulme Trust. He is associated with a new series of podcasts on human ...