Anyone who enjoys ice cream can thank evolution. Just 10,000 years ago, no one past infancy could digest milk sugar, called lactose. Babies always made lactase, the enzyme that breaks down this ...

In their 2009 book The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution, Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending calculate that — rather than there having been no biological ...

Richard Wrangham's forthcoming book The Goodness Paradox explores the strange relationship between virtue and violence in human evolution. ... except from occasional fossil finds such as the massacre ...

We’ve seen some evolution in our species over the past few millennia, but it was detected by reconstructing history from DNA sequences. For example, we know that during the past 10,000 years ...

Any one of these — and the list is far from exhaustive — could lead to the sort of pressures that could accelerate evolution — beyond the background rate — in human populations.

Hybrid species of human, once seen by experts as science fiction, may have played a key role in our evolution. Here are 6 recent discoveries that illuminate our story.

Scientists have used paleogenomics to trace 10,000 years of human immune system evolution. They analyzed the genomes of more than 2,800 individuals who lived in Europe over the past ten millennia.

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month. Let’s talk about the biggest coincidence in human ...

Humans were living in rainforests roughly 150,000 years ago, some 80,000 years earlier than was previously thought—and may have been an important center for early human evolution.