In the winter of 1829, Dutch-Belgian anthropologist Philippe-Charles Schmerling discovered a fossil in a cave in Engis, Belgium — what looked like the partial skull of a small child. Schmerling is ...

The human genome is a rich, complex record of migration, encounters, and inheritance written over thousands of millennia. Genomic research by members of Sarah Tishkoff's lab at the University of ...

For more than a century, Neanderthals have been cast as a vanished side branch of the human family tree, a brief encounter in our deep past. The latest high resolution Neanderthal genome, combined ...

Scientists have identified a Neanderthal-derived gene that increases fertility in modern humans by enhancing progesterone production in early pregnancy. The gene, active in about 20% of non-African ...

Neanderthals may not have truly gone extinct but instead may have been absorbed into the modern human population. That's one of the implications of a new study, which finds modern human DNA may have ...

When ancient humans interbred, new research shows that the pairings were predominantly male Neanderthals and female Homo sapiens. Reconstruction of a Neanderthal man (Homo neanderthalensis), based on ...

Non-Africans carry around 2% Neanderthal DNA in their genomes — yet there's one chromosome where DNA from our ancient cousins is nowhere to be found. At several points in our tangled history, modern ...

Every human face is unique, allowing us to distinguish between individuals. We know little about how facial features are encoded in our DNA, but we may be able to learn more about how our faces ...