When our distant ancestors first traded nomadic life for farming, villages, and permanent homes, you might assume that the beastly forces of natural selection lost their ability to shape our species, ...

Learn how repeated burn injuries may have acted as a form of natural selection, influencing human genes linked to healing and immune response. Fire transformed human society in obvious ways. Less ...

Many people are familiar with the concept of natural selection and “survival of the fittest.” While modern humans may look like they’ve been at their “fittest” for hundreds of thousands of years, new ...

Some researchers hold that evolution hasn’t much altered humans in the past 10,000 years. A new analysis of ancient DNA indicates that natural selection continued to shape hundreds of genes. By Carl ...

Throughout most of human history, evolution progressed slowly. Small genetic changes took thousands of years to permeate populations. Natural selection was intentional, reactive, and gradual. However, ...

For more than a century, scientists have sought to reconstruct human evolution using diverse lines of evidence, including fossils, genetic variation across populations, and ancient DNA. Building on ...

HUMANS HAVE never been immune from the pressures of natural selection. Throughout the history of the species circumstances have arisen to give individuals with certain beneficial mutations an ...

Most components of the human body have been driven by natural selection to ensure our species’ survival — the chin, though, is not one of them. Chins are uniquely human, since no other animals have ...

Human aging is not what natural selection failed to prevent. It is what happens when selection simply has nothing left to act on. There’s something unsettling about the fact that the human body starts ...