Long before industry, our ancestors faced toxic metals, including lead. This exposure may have shaped the evolution of human ...

Scientists find genetic mutation, millions of years ago. Oct. 12, 2011 — -- About three million years ago human predecessors embarked on a new course that would forever alter the evolution of our ...

A digital reconstruction of a million-year-old skull suggests humans may have diverged from our ancient ancestors 400,000 years earlier than thought and in Asia not Africa, a study said Friday. The ...

A 12-year-old’s fossilized jawbone found in the Hualongdong region of China may belong to an entirely new human species. Blending features of Homo sapiens and Denisovans, the specimen suggests modern ...

Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture ...

A paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution finds that the relatively high rate of autism-spectrum disorders in humans is likely due to how humans evolved in the past. The paper is titled "A general ...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be the result of millions of years of evolution. Rapid neuronal evolution in humans is likely ASD’s genetic cause, new research suggests. Though autism can cause ...