I have spent years covering discoveries that nudge our origin story around the edges, but the sequencing of DNA from one of the very last Neanderthals does something different: it rewrites the center ...

When scientists sequenced the first Neanderthal genomes, they did not just resurrect a lost branch of the human family tree, ...

Once thought primitive, we now know Neanderthals were intelligent and even interbred with modern humans—many people today carry some Neanderthal DNA. Turns out, a lot of our jokes against our ...

Every human face is unique, allowing us to distinguish between individuals. We know little about how facial features are encoded in our DNA, but we may be able to learn more about how our faces ...

Every face carries a story, shaped long before birth by a quiet choreography of genes switching on and off at just the right moment. A new study suggests that part of that story reaches far back into ...

The Neanderthal Connection Every person alive today carries traces of Neanderthal DNA, typically around 2% of their genome. This genetic legacy comes from interbreeding events between Homo sapiens and ...

Scientists may have uncovered a surprising link between a painful brain condition and the DNA we inherited from our ancient Neanderthal relatives. Modern humans may owe more to Neanderthals than just ...

New research suggests a genetic dynamic that may have contributed to Neanderthals' extinction. Neanderthal-Museum, Mettmann CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons Did interbreeding between humans and ...

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works. When scientists sequenced the Neanderthal genome in 2010, they learned that Neanderthals ...

I read your column “Do Most Whites Have Traces of African DNA, as I Do?” with interest. The questioner in that column was wondering whether the traces of African ancestry in her DNA test entered her ...

The first analysis of a well-preserved nasal cavity in the human fossil record has revealed that the hefty Neanderthal nose wasn’t adapted to cold climates in the way many people thought it was.