Ancestry & Evolution
The desire to understand our origins is primal. By examining our DNA over successive generations through the evolutionary process of inherited characteristics of human and animal populationsโas well as from those species from which humans share a common ancestryโwe can decipher our individual and collective past and develop medical innovations for the future.
Below is the complete archive of related articles sorted by date.
โTech bro hypeโ vs. serious science: The inside story on Colossalโs attempt to create a real-life Jurassic Park
Can and should we resurrect animal species that have been extinct for thousands of years? Such weighty, existential questions were ...
Understanding the evolution of individualityโFruit flies may have an answer
As a Ph.D. student, I wanted to understand the evolution of individual differences in fruit fly behavior โ the building ...
Sleeping for centuries: Unpacking the mystery of the survival of animals
What can plants or animals do when faced with harsh conditions? Two options for survival seem most obvious: move elsewhere ...
Paywall science predicament: AI answers often skew toward misinformation
When researchers Matthew Magnani of the University of Maine and Jon Clindaniel of the University of Chicago tried prompting ChatGPT ...
‘Why do humans have language and other animals apparently donโt?’
Why do humans have language and other animals apparently donโt? Itโs one of the most enduring questions in the study ...
How war, politics and religion shape wildlife evolution
People often consider evolution to be a process that occurs in nature in the background of human society. But evolution ...
From Hitler to Richard III to Lenin, DNA can illuminate the lives, characters, and motivations of people long dead
Hitler left blood. Richard III left bones. Lenin left an entire body, preserved like a specimen. For centuries, historians and ...
What will the human race look like centuries into the future? Here are three possibilities, and one is chilling
Everything around us seems to be changing at breakneck speed. Twenty years ago, smartphones were niche products. Twenty years before ...
Promise & PerilโAIโs Open Questions: Year in Review
Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept. It is already embedded in how we grow food, diagnose disease, manage ...
Multiple wives or husbands is a scourge on society? Science suggests hidden advantages of polygamy and polygyny
In July 2025, Ugandaโs courts swiftly dismissed a petition challenging the legality of polygamy, citing the protection of religious and ...
โThe dire wolf isnโt backโ: A Colossal failure or the cutting-edge of conservation? Maybe both
When Colossal unveiled its interpretation of the dire wolf in April, the news made international headlines. Enthusiastic profiles in Time ...
GLP podcast: Evolutionary mismatch. Is civilization wrecking our health?
There's a dangerous mismatch between our biology and the tech-saturated world we inhabitโand it might be killing us. That's the ...
Evolutionary quirkย or survival instict? Why are we ticklish?
Only humans and our close relatives are known to engage in tickling behaviour, suggesting that it may have evolved in ...
Mismatch of bodies and brains: Humans were not built for our industrialized present;ย our evolutionary future looks grim
In a recentย research paperย co-authored with Daniel Longman, ... [evolutionary anthropologistย Colin Shaw] argues that the extensive environmental shifts of the Anthropocene ...
Speculation on how our brains may have evolved to invent the idea of gods
Recent archaeological and neurobiological evidence suggests that as the human brain evolved, specific cognitive abilities appeared that paralleled the invention ...
Quirks of evolution: Human vs ape testicle size and why we are the only animal with chins
The human body is a machine whose many parts โ from the microscopic details of our cells to our limbs, ...
Kiss and tell: The 21 million-year-old history of smooching
Humans do it, monkeys do it, even polar bears do it. And now researchers have reconstructed the evolutionary origins of ...
Can culture evolve through natural selection?
For well over a century, Darwinโs theory of natural selection has served as biologyโs grand unifying framework, explaining how species ...
About โgenetic losersโ and โmad genesโ: My encounter with one of the most brilliant and controversial scientists of the genome era
The recent death of James Watson, co-discoverer with Francis Crick of the three-dimensional structure of the genetic material DNA, brought ...
A journey for one Muslim creationist to embrace evidence-based science and evolution
Ella al-Shamahiย is a palaeoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist who grew up as a creationist. ... [She] thought she'd be able to ...
Would humans re-evolve if we went extinct?
To recreate an extinct species exactly, evolution would have to reproduce not just its traits but its entire genetic code ...
GLP podcast: ObesityโDisease or Choice? Ozempicโs Triumph Reignites the Debate
US obesity rates are falling from a record high after steadily climbing since the 1960s, dropping to 37 percent this ...
The resurrection of the dire wolf is phony, but Colossal Biosciences’ de-extinction research could revolutionize drug development and healthcare
Similar to the way NASAโs effort to launch humans into space once triggered a frenzy of technological advances in areas ...
Preserved poop offers a window into the health and life of ancient humans
Feces is anย open windowย into the many other organisms living in our bodiesโfrom beneficial bacteria to harmful parasites. The genetic material ...
Resurrecting Neanderthals: The scientific challenge and ethical debate
When scientists sequenced theย Neanderthal genomeย in 2010, they learned that Neanderthalsย interbredย with human ancestors before mysteriously going extinct. This genetic breakthrough yielded ...
Human differences: The concept of โraceโ is infused with historical prejudice but โgenetic populationsโ are real. Whatโs the difference?
In the recent flurry of executive orders from President Donald Trump, one warned of โa distorted narrativeโ about race โdriven ...
Viewpoint: Revisiting the debate over genes and IQ
Inย The Bell Curve, Murray and Herrnstein argue that intelligence, as measured by an IQ score, is a crucial determinant of ...
