Enlarge (credit: Avi Levin and Ilan Theiler, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel Aviv University) It’s probably long past time to stop thinking of humanity’s nearest relatives as forming a family tree. Our close relatives like the Neanderthals and Denisovans clearly interbred both with us and each other. There are also indications that an older African […]
Enlarge / The Arkansas state capitol. (credit: Daniel Schwen) Last week, the Arkansas state House of Representatives passed a bill that would amend state education law to allow teachers in public schools to teach creationism as “a theory of how the earth came to exist.” As it stands, the act promotes blatantly unconstitutional behavior as […]
Enlarge / One of the remarkably intact Dmanisi skulls at the time of its discovery. (credit: Guy Bar-Oz) We have an extensive collection of fossils from the lineages that produced us humans. A large number of Australopithecus and early Homo skeletons track the transition to bipedal walking and the appearance of features that mark our […]
Enlarge / The bacteria (yellow) live inside a larger eukaryotic cell. (credit: MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR MARINE MICROBIOLOGY) Deep in Switzerland’s Lake Zug swims a microorganism that has evolved a strange way to “breathe.” A team of researchers discovered a novel partnership between a single-celled eukaryote—an organism with a clearly defined nucleus holding its genome—and […]
Enlarge / A mammoth tusk thaws out of the ground in Siberia. Ancient DNA has revolutionized how we understand human evolution, revealing how populations moved and interacted and introducing us to relatives like the Denisovans, a “ghost lineage” that we wouldn’t realize existed if it weren’t for discovering their DNA. But humans aren’t the only […]
Enlarge / The difference between modern human (left) and Neanderthal skulls means there must be some differences in how their brains develop. (credit: Wikimedia Commons) What are the key differences between modern humans and our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans? For the Neanderthals, there doesn’t look to be any sort of obvious difference. They […]
Enlarge (credit: Wikimedia commons) Dire wolves had a burst of newfound fame with their appearance in Game of Thrones, where they were portrayed as a far larger version of more mundane wolves. Here in the real world, only the largest populations of present-day wolves get as large as the dire wolf, which weighed nearly 70 […]
Expand (charge: Jordan Hartig) People have domesticated a significant number of creatures above their history, a few for meals, some as guards and companions. A couple of species–believe animals such as rabbits and guinea pigs–have partially shifted between both of these groups — presently serving as both pets and food. However one species has abandoned […]
Expand / All these excavations identified Denisovan DNA inside the sediment. The Denisovans occupy an extremely bizarre place in humankind’s history. Such as the Neanderthals, they’re an {} branch away from the lineage that made modern people and afterwards intermingled with modern people. But we had understood of Neanderthals for about 150 years until we […]
Expand / A construction within an Ndebele village, South Africa. Even the Ndebele language speakers, now about a thousand strong, arrived in South Africa together using all the Bantu expansion. (charge: DEA / / S. VANNINI / / Getty Images) Breeze originated in Africa, and it stayed there for {} . To know our shared […]