Human Evolution
If we manage to avoid a large catastrophe, we are living at the early beginnings of human history.
Evolutionary pressures drove the formation of tribes who encoded their values in myths and symbols. Was this cooperation cursed?
The chances that a newborn survives childhood have increased from 50% to 96% globally.
Nobody knows where the word “penguin” comes from.
Left-handed humans were likelier to get stabbed in the heart.
How humans came to feel comfortable among strangers, like those in a café, is an under-explored mystery.
Science isn’t synonymous with technology; it’s about a way of thinking.
Most male mammals have little or nothing to do with their kids. Why is our own species different?
Researchers discovered something modern humans had never before seen—a flashy Neanderthal horn collection.
A new discovery pushes back the origin of these technologies by about 40,000 years.
At least one of Earth’s creatures is able to survive the vacuum of space.
Did fire change the development of the human brain?
This is your brain on work.
Archaeologists turn to other scientific fields to fill in the picture of how victims lived and why they died.
Only humans can voluntarily conjure new objects and events in our minds.
Human thinking is antiquated.
“Language is the most distinctively human talent.”
A wide-scale examination of early Neolithic human skeletons reveals the violent history of a supposedly peaceful period.
Ancient humans crossed the Bering Strait land bridge from Asia into North America. But some of them went back.
Humans are good visual thinkers, too, but we tend to privilege verbal thinking.
In the early 20th century, a young biochemist named Alexander Oparin set out to connect “the world of the living” to “the world of the dead.”
Only recently have scientists directly witnessed this most pivotal of events in biology.
We are still new at this.
2022 was another busy year in the realm of science, with groundbreaking stories spanning space, materials, medicine, and technology.
Virtually all the statistical methods researchers commonly use assume potential mating partners decide who they will have children with based on a roll of the dice.
About 8% of our genome is made of leftover viruses from our ancestors’ infections.