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 ...

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 ...

Scientists have decoded the world’s oldest human DNA sequence, beating the previous record by almost 300,000 years, and at the same time confusing what we know of our early relatives. Published in ...

For the first time, scientists have reconstructed the ancient genomes of human betaherpesvirus 6A and 6B (HHV-6A/B) from archaeological human remains more than two millennia old. The study, led by the ...

Analysis of ancient proteins may fill in the gaps of human evolution left by the decomposition of DNA. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it ...

Russell has a PhD in the history of medicine, violence, and colonialism. His research has explored topics including ethics, science governance, and medical involvement in violent contexts. Russell has ...

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 ...