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 ...

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 ...

When scientists sequenced the Neanderthal genome in 2010, they learned that Neanderthals interbred with human ancestors before mysteriously going extinct. As a result, many people alive today share up ...

The discovery of ancient human cousins has long stirred wonder and debate. Early Neanderthal remains offered a glimpse into our distant past, prompting questions about how they lived and whether they ...

Once thought primitive, we now know Neanderthals were intelligent and even interbred with modern humans—many people today carry some Neanderthal DNA. Turns out, a lot of our jokes against our ...

Every face carries a story, shaped long before birth by a quiet choreography of genes switching on and off at just the right moment. A new study suggests that part of that story reaches far back into ...

(CNN) — In a rocky outcrop on Mount Carmel, in what is now Israel, a group of ancient humans buried their dead about 140,000 years ago. Scientists uncovered the site, called Skhul Cave, in 1928, and ...

Every human face is unique, allowing us to distinguish between individuals. We know little about how facial features are encoded in our DNA, but we may be able to learn more about how our faces ...

I read your column “Do Most Whites Have Traces of African DNA, as I Do?” with interest. The questioner in that column was wondering whether the traces of African ancestry in her DNA test entered her ...

In their new study an international team led by the University of Vienna reports the discovery and extraction of ancient DNA from a tiny 5 cm long Neanderthal bone found in the Crimean peninsula, ...

Demography relating known and proposed archaic lineages to modern human populations. (A) Basic demographic model with CSFS fit. W Afr, West Africans; Eur, European; N, Neanderthal; D, Denisovan; UA, ...