24 November 2021
Compassion and sociability helped Homo sapiens survive climatic changes that wiped out other types of humans. Will those skills be enough to survive another bout of climate change?
24 November 2021
We once shared the planet with at least seven other types of human. Ironically, our success may have been due to our deepest vulnerability: being dependent on others
17 November 2021
Dig down, and evolution by natural selection is just about spontaneous, sustained accumulation of complexity – if life elsewhere exists, it’s likely to develop in the same way
15 September 2021
Plaque fossilises while we are still alive. Now, dental calculus is giving up the secrets of our ancient ancestors, from what they ate to how they interacted and evolved
18 August 2021
The study of human evolution has neglected huge areas of Earth, and recent discoveries from Arabia suggest these places have a lot to tell us
18 August 2021
New evidence reveals that Arabia was not a mere stopover for ancestral humans leaving Africa, but a lush homeland where they flourished and evolved
28 July 2021
Newly discovered cave art gives fresh insight into the minds of our ancestors - and upends the idea that a Stone Age cultural explosion was unique to Europe
5 July 2021
Richard Lewontin was an evolutionary biologist who showed that most genetic variation is within populations rather than between “racial” groups
30 June 2021
We should be wary of attempts to impose a simple narrative on the story of early human evolution – recent discoveries can be interpreted in many ways and future finds are likely to cause further rethinking
23 June 2021
New developments in a 10,000-year-old cold case have upended our ideas about how and when tuberculosis began infecting humans – and offered hope for a better vaccine
