Did modern humans erase Neanderthals, or did our close cousins fade away for reasons that had little to do with us? A pair of major papers in Science and Nature on Dec. 12, 2024, sharpen that question ...

A complex picture of how Neanderthals died out, and the role that modern humans played in their disappearance, is emerging.

The basic outline of the interactions between modern humans and Neanderthals is now well established. The two came in contact as modern humans began their major expansion out of Africa, which occurred ...

Many people today simply assume that our evolution has quietly ended with the development of the modern human. It's easy to think that medicine, science, and modern living have made us "perfect" or ...

Lead exposure has been thought to be a uniquely modern phenomenon. Exposure to lead by ancient humans could have given modern humans a survival advantage over other species – more specifically, their ...

Humans once had a way smaller footprint. "Homo Sapiens, modern humans, evolved in Africa," says Arev Sümer, a paleogenetics PhD student at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in ...

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 ...

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. Modern humans descended from ...

Denisovans, a mysterious human relative, left behind far more than a handful of fossils—they left genetic fingerprints in modern humans across the globe. Multiple interbreeding events with distinct ...

After modern humans left Africa, they met and interbred with Neandertals, resulting in around two to three percent Neandertal DNA that can be found in the genomes of all people outside Africa today.

Learn how the chin became an evolutionary byproduct that's unique to humans.