Evolution

An international team of scientists uncovered the microfossils of the speck-size creature they are calling Saccorhytus coronaries in Shaanxi Province, central China. According to their findings, published this week in the journal Nature, Saccorhytus lived 540 million years ago, ...read more

The fossils were found in 2013 by two amateur cavers spelunking through the recesses of the Rising Star cave system, located 30 miles northwest of Johannesburg. The fossil-rich region has been called the “Cradle of Humankind” thanks to the past discovery of extinct hominins. The ...read more

Old World monkeys, one of the two main monkey groups, belong to the family Cercopithecidae, which is related to apes and humans. They are distinguished from New World monkeys by the form of the nose: Like apes and humans, Old World monkeys have narrow noses with downward-facing ...read more

John T. Scopes was a 24-year-old physics, chemistry and math teacher at the public high school in Dayton, Tennessee, when local community leaders persuaded him to answer the ACLU’s call for a defendant in a test case challenging the Butler Act. That law, passed in March 1925, ...read more

Under a searing African sun on January 29, 2013, an international team of paleoanthropologists scoured a dusty plateau looking for clues to the origins of mankind. Aboveground, the surrounding Ethiopian landscape at the northern end of the Rift Valley looked barren, but the field ...read more

While alcohol (called dietary ethanol by scientists) is a toxin, humans are able to tolerate a moderate amount of it without getting sick. We owe this ability to digestive enzymes, particularly alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme (ADH4), which are found in our guts, throats and tongues. ...read more

Anatomically modern humans first evolved some 200,000 years ago, but many of the traits we associate with early civilization—like bone and antler tools, grindstones, projectile weapons, fishing and the widespread use of fire—didn’t crop up until around 40,000-50,000 years ago, ...read more

According to long-established opinion among scientists, the human lineage emerged a little more than 2 million years ago, as the forests on the African continent retreated and the dry savanna expanded. In order to survive, our ape-like ancestors were forced to adapt key human ...read more

Ever since the mid-1800s, scientists have known that a major event occurred around 252 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period and the beginning of the Triassic. Fossil evidence had mounted by that time indicating that the boundary marked a major change in the ...read more

1. Darwin was born on the same day as Abraham Lincoln. Both Darwin and Lincoln were born on February 12, 1809, but in much different settings. While America’s 16th president was born in a rude log cabin in the Kentucky wilderness, Darwin was born in a grand Georgian house on an ...read more

More than 200 million years ago, west Texas was a swampy, tropical rainforest with tall conifers, lush ferns and bountiful lakes. Today the region is dry and scrubby, but the dusty soil of the windswept plains still possesses evidence of the prehistoric creatures that once roamed ...read more

In 2004, a team of paleontologists in the Canadian Arctic excavated fossils belonging to a crocodile-like fish called Tiktaalik roseae. The discovery intrigued the scientific community because of the fish’s unusual makeup: Though it had scales and gills, it also had strong ...read more

The 5-inch (12.5-centimeter) hind-toe bone fragment that the team used to decipher the ancient horse’s genetic code was unearthed in the Thistle Creek region of the Yukon’s Klondike gold mines. Because the fossil bone was preserved in permafrost, the horse’s DNA remained very ...read more

As part of the study, which appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), an international team of scientists re-examined previously tested animal fossils from Neanderthal-era sites in southern Iberia (modern-day Spain), a region believed to have been one ...read more

In the first half of the 20th century, experts thought they had pinned down the evolutionary history that culminated in our species, Homo sapiens. According to conventional wisdom, our direct ancestor Homo erectus—first discovered in Indonesia in 1891—branched off from the common ...read more

In human “natural fertility societies,” meaning groups that don’t use birth control, women breastfeed their children for an average of 27 months—until toddlers reach 2 years and a few months in age. While this may seem like a decent amount of time, it’s only a tiny fraction of ...read more

Fire control changed the course of human evolution, allowing our ancestors to stay warm, cook food, ward off predators and venture into harsh climates. It also had important social and behavioral implications, encouraging groups of people to gather together and stay up late. ...read more

Descended from flying seabirds similar to today’s albatrosses, penguins have been gliding through the world’s oceans and waddling across its shores for some 61 million years. While the first penguin fossil appeared in 1859, paleontologists and other experts have struggled to ...read more