If you've ever watched a documentary about the history of life on Earth, chances are you've heard the term "missing link." Applied to our own evolutionary story, it conjures a vivid image: a half-ape, ...

Protein evolution plays a key role in many biological processes that are essential for life – but what does it have to do with physics? Schematic overview of procedure used to generate simulated ...

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 ...

Scientists have uncovered ancient human remains that could represent a crucial link in our evolutionary history. Fossils, including bones and teeth, dating back 773,000 years, were unearthed in a ...

Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a growing health threat, but its evolution outside laboratory settings is poorly understood. Bacteria living in the human gut are now found to evolve persistent ...

Environmental change doesn’t affect evolution in a single, predictable way. In large-scale computer simulations, scientists discovered that some fluctuating conditions help populations evolve higher ...

When Aristotle claimed that humans differ from other animals because they have the ability to be rational, he understood rational to mean that we could form our views and beliefs based on evidence, ...

It wasn’t the size of human brains that distinguished people from apes, he theorized, but the way they were organized. He found a creative way to prove it. By Adam Nossiter Ralph Holloway, an ...