The textbook assumption is that when the first modern humans arrived in Europe, around 45,000 years ago, they quickly evolved pale skin to adapt to the region’s dimmer sunlight relative to Africa. The ...

Modern humans still carry DNA from two previously unknown extinct human lineages, according to a new study from the ...

Knowledge about the first settlements of Homo sapiens in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic has been significantly advanced with a new study led by Edgar ...

Modern humans are evolutionary survivors, thriving generation after generation while our ancient relatives died out. Now, new research into our brain chemistry suggests that an enzyme unique to Homo ...

Africa has long been known as the cradle of humanity. Fossils, tools and genetics all point there. Yet the deeper story of how the first modern humans lived, moved and mixed has stayed blurry. Too ...

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,” ...

When humans hooked up with Neanderthals, we could have wooed them with music and fancy jewellery. The oldest DNA of a modern human ever to be sequenced shows that the Homo sapiens who interbred with ...

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. Among the many other human species that once inhabited ...