Since the turn of the millennium, our understanding of our ancestors and extended cousins has shifted dramatically, thanks to ...

For many people, discomfort during a medical injection or a long tattoo session feels especially intense. According to new ...

New fossils unearthed in Morocco could help solve the mystery of how Homo sapiens diverged from other ancient humans like ...

Ancient DNA is turning human evolution into a crime scene reconstruction, and one of the prime suspects is a herpesvirus that ...

On Valentine’s Day in 2018, a team of scientists walked across a flat expanse in the badlands of northeastern Ethiopia, scanning the ground for fossils. An eagle-eyed field assistant, Omar Abdulla, ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

The Moroccan fossils now provide tangible evidence from this mysterious transitional period. What makes these fossils particularly significant is the precision with which they can be dated. The ...

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