It's nature, not nuture: personality lies in genes, twins study shows

Genes play a greater role in determining key personality traits like social skills and learning ability than the way we are brought up by our parents, researchers claimed. The findings contradict the existing belief among psychologists that the environment we grow up in plays  …

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'This is the cost of being human': The same gene that allowed modern humans to evolve speech may have caused autism

Genes in in the human brain that only recently evolved - allowing us to speak and make complex decisions - are missing in some people with autism and learning disabilities. ‘This is the cost of being human,’ said Nenad Sestan, associate professor of neurobiolog …

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What if our hands had 6 fingers?

Worldwide, most humans count in blocks of 10: we tally up to nine of something before shifting over to a new number column and starting again with one (so that each column is worth 10 times the amount in the column to its right). This is a "base-10" numeral system, and anth …

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Largest known crocodile likely ate early man

The largest known crocodile was big enough to swallow a human being and likely terrorized our ancestors two to four million years ago. Remains of the enormous horned croc, named Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni, were unearthed in East Africa. The impressive aquatic reptile exceeded …

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Did a Copying Mistake Make Humans So Smart?

A copyediting error appears to be responsible for critical features of the human brain that distinguish us from our closest primate kin, new research finds. When tested out in mice, researchers found this "error" caused the rodents' brain cells to move into place faster an …

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Superior Navigation Secret to Humans' Success?

Poor Neanderthals. Every time anthropologists acknowledge that these “brutes” were more sophisticated than previously thought, researchers come up a new reason why our closest cousins were inferior.

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Human Societies Starting to Resemble Ant Colonies

The human population is growing at such a staggering rate that we have more in common with some ants than we do with our closest relatives the chimpanzees," Mark Moffett, author of the study, told Discovery News. "With a maximum size of about 100, no chimpanzee group has to  …

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Human Evolution Isn't Over, New Research Shows

[S]ome researchers have questioned whether natural forces of selection continue to act upon our species. To explore this debate further, scientists examined church records of nearly 6,000 Finns born between 1760 and 1849, which detailed information on births, deaths, marriag …

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Strange organism has unique roots in tree of life

Talk about extended family: A single-celled organism in Norway has been called "mankind's furthest relative." It is so far removed from the organisms we know that researchers claim it belongs to a new base group, called a kingdom, on the tree of life." We have found an unknown …

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Thinking in a Foreign Language Makes Decisions More Rational

To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language. A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits  …

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Why We're Drawn to Fire

A dancing fire is pretty, as well as tantalizingly dangerous, but there may be a much deeper reason for our attraction to it. Daniel Fessler, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has conducted research that indicates an adult's fascinatio …

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Know Your Roots? Tke the Human Evolution Quiz!

Think you know a thing or two about human evolutionary history?  Try this quiz and test yourself.  You may even learn something new while doing it.

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For Most Of Human History, Being An Omnivore Was No Dilemma

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The Top Seven Human Evolution Discoveries in Kenya

Kenya is not only the home to many of the world's greatest marathon runners, but it is also the location where some of the most important discoveries in human evolutionary science have been made.  This article summarizes some of the most important finds:

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Baboons' word choices a key to human language ability

Charles Darwin would surely have been mesmerized by a paper released last week showing that baboons can recognize written words and distinguish them from gibberish. This was more than a feat of memorization, since the baboons were able to do this even if they’d never  …

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Asking old human tissue to answer new scientific questions

The genomics revolution, two decades old, has given biological researchers an astonishing array of tools, both physical and computational, to extract information from once-living tissue. Perhaps the most spectacular example was the discovery of enough remnant DNA in Neanderthal …

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Why humans are wired to run - and ferrets are not

Ferrets don’t get “runner’s high,” but dogs do. That curious observation, published in the latest issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology, offers surprising new insights into the evolutionary forces that guide the behaviour of ferrets and dogs &nda …

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Excessive worrying may have co-evolved with intelligence

Worrying may have evolved along with intelligence as a beneficial trait, according to a recent study by scientists at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and other institutions. Jeremy Coplan, MD, professor of psychiatry at SUNY Downstate, and colleagues found that high intellige …

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Why Everyone Believes in Magic (Even You)

Even the most die-hard skeptics among us believe in magic. Humans can't help it: though we try to be logical, irrational beliefs — many of which we aren't even conscious of — are hardwired in our psyches. But rather than hold us back, the unavoidable habits of mind that  …

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So healthy, a caveman used to do it: Is the future of fitness from the Stone Age?

What does a being from the Stone Age know about fitness in the age of smart phones and plastic surgery? Everything, as far as Paleo Fitness practitioners are concerned. From our weight rooms to our dinner tables, these super-retro exercise enthusiasts believe we learned ever …

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Majority-biased learning: In humans and chimpanzees knowledge is transmitted within a group by means of a majority principle

The transmission of knowledge to the next generation is a key feature of human evolution. In particular, humans tend to copy behaviour that is demonstrated by many other individuals. Chimpanzees and orangutans, two of our closest living relatives, also socially pass on traditio …

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Teamwork made Humans brainier, say scientists

Compared to his hominid predecessors, Homo sapiens is a cerebral giant, a riddle that scientists have long tried to solve. The answer, according to researchers in Ireland and Scotland, may lie in social interaction.  Working with others helped Man to survive, but he had …

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Why action stars are more likely to be Republicans

Fighting ability, largely determined by upper body strength, continues to rule the minds of modern men, according to a new study by Aaron Sell from Griffith University in Australia and colleagues. Their work explores the concept that human males are designed for fighting, a …

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Researchers Take Closer Look at Ancient Human Tool Use

Archaeologists and anthropologists look beyond the fossils of ancient human relatives to interpret the presence of our ancestors, including the items associated with day-to-day life, from discarded tools to the ashes from fire pits. The marks made by crude stone cutting tool …

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Could Humans Have Evolved From Dolphins?

The most common theory of human evolution suggests that humans evolved from an ape-like ancestor. But what if we evolved from something that was a little more like a seal or dolphin? Over the years, a handful of evolutionary biologists have proffered the weird theory that we …

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