Genes make us who we are—but are they shaped by chance, natural selection, or something else?

Ancient encounters between humans and the mysterious Denisovans are still shaping people today. By analyzing genomes from populations across the Pacific, researchers uncovered evidence that the ...

The people of Near Oceania carry a genetic legacy that stretches back almost to the beginning of humanity’s expansion across ...

For more than a century, human origins have been told as a story of expansion, migration, and survival. But deep in that ...

Denisovans, a mysterious human relative, left behind far more than a handful of fossils—they left genetic fingerprints in modern humans across the globe. Multiple interbreeding events with distinct ...

The inhabitants of New Guinea and its outlying islands have played an important role in the human history of the Pacific region. Nevertheless, the genetic diversity, particularly of pre-colonial ...

Horses have played a critical role in shaping human society, but scientists are still piecing together the story of their domestication. Reading time 3 minutes Roughly 4,500 years ago, humans forged a ...

The Indigenous peoples of the Bolivian highlands are survivors. For thousands of years they have lived at altitudes of more than two miles, where oxygen is about 35 percent lower than at sea level.

Local ancestry inference is crucial for unraveling demographic histories, discovering selection signals, and including admixed individuals in genomic studies for improved equity and portability. To ...

A Late Neolithic skull. For the recent study, scientists extracted DNA from skulls and teeth to look for traces of diseases. Marie Louise Jørkov under CC BY-NC 3.0 From avian influenza to Zika virus, ...