The work demonstrates the power of ancient DNA to illuminate human biology and medicine in addition to history. A massive ...

NEW YORK -- Humans and Neanderthals cozied up from time to time when they lived in the same areas tens of thousands of years ago. But we don't know much about who got with whom, or why. A new genetic ...

Ancient DNA has revealed that a common childhood herpesvirus was infecting—and even embedding itself into human genomes—thousands of years ago. The findings show a deep, shared evolutionary history ...

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Not every modern human has the same set of Neanderthal DNA, however; different people will, by chance, have inherited different fragments. But there are also some areas, termed “Neanderthal deserts,” ...

Deep inside a handful of caves, scientists are pulling genetic secrets out of bones, teeth and even the surrounding dirt, and the results are upending what we thought we knew about our own species.

When he was a doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen, Eske Willerslev was a nobody. At least, that’s how it seemed to the budding evolutionary geneticist, who was unable to lay his hands on ...

Every time you look in the mirror, you are seeing the legacy of an extinct cousin. A small but influential fraction of your genome comes from Neanderthals, and those ancient fragments are still ...

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