A new study suggests that present-day Europeans share more genes with now-extinct Neandertals than do living Africans, at least partly because of interbreeding that took place between 37,000 and 86,000 years ago. Cross-species mating occurred when Stone Age humans left Africa and encountered Neandertals, or possibly a close Neandertal relative, upon reaching the Middle East…
Fragments of a 1.5-million-year-old skull from a child recently found in Tanzania suggest early hominids weren’t just occasional carnivores but regular meat eaters, researchers say. The finding helps build the case that meat-eating helped the human lineage evolve large brains, scientists added. “I know this will sound awful to vegetarians, but meat made us human,”…
Homo sapiens appeared 180,000 years ago, but for the next hundred thousand years stuck to a comparatively small area centered around a number of central African lakes. After this time, though, the species moved out from central Africa and across the continent in what has been called the great expansion – ultimately ending up in…
Guys’ eyes are more sensitive to small details and moving objects, while women are more perceptive to color changes, according to a new vision study that suggests men and women actually do see things differently. “As with other senses, such as hearing and the olfactory system, there are marked sex differences in vision between men…
It’s an old party trick—sucking helium from balloons so you can sing like a Wizard of Oz munchkin. When gibbons inhale this non-toxic gas, researchers can detect much more sophisticated impersonations. It turns out that gibbon vocalization techniques mirror those of highly trained soprano opera singers. “We’ve shown how the gibbons’ distinctive song uses the…
Human and chimp brains look anatomically similar because both evolved from the same ancestor millions of years ago. But where does the chimp brain end and the human brain begin? A new UCLA study pinpoints uniquely human patterns of gene activity in the brain that could shed light on how we evolved differently than our…
Newfound pieces of human skull from “the Cave of the Monkeys” in Laos are the earliest skeletal evidence yet that humans once had an ancient, rapid migration to Asia. Anatomically modern humans first arose about 200,000 years ago in Africa. When and how our lineage then dispersed out of Africa has long proven controversial. Archaeological…
The common ancestor of sharks and humans — and all jawed animals with a backbone for that matter — possessed a sixth sense: the ability to detect electrical fields under water. The anatomical tools for this ability, called electroreceptors and electrosensory ampullary organs, arose from the same cell population in both cartilaginous fishes (such as…
Humans could be the only animals that are sensitive to fairness, suggests a new Royal Society Biology Letters study. It’s not that other animals are unfair. They just don’t seem to care as much about fairness as we do, or so this and other research concludes. Ingrid Kaiser of the University of Heidelberg and colleagues…
Human history more than matches the best soap operas and Hollywood thrillers. The latest blockbuster is a tale of sex and war on an epic scale but from an era that pre-dates conventional historical analysis. It comes from the world of anthropology where researchers are piecing together the twists and turns using the latest genome…