Records from two nearly 100-year-old shipwrecks, the Titanic and the Lusitania, have given researchers new insight into human selfishness — and altruism.

Researchers from the Scientific Institute IRCCS, Milan University and the Politecnico di Milano analysed the genomes of 52 populations from different parts of the world with exposure to a wide range of viruses over 200,000 years of human evolution.

If Neanderthals ever walk the earth again, the primordial ooze from which they will rise is an emulsion of oil, water, and DNA capture beads engineered in the laboratory of 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut.

Do apes and monkeys have a secret language that has not yet been decrypted? And if so, will it resolve the mystery of how the human faculty for language evolved? Biologists have approached the issue in two ways, by trying to teach human language to chimpanzees and other species,  …

AN ATTENTION deficit, rather than an inability to feel emotion, may be what makes psychopathic individuals seem fearless. It's a finding that challenges the common characterisation of such people as cold-blooded predators.

"A tidy house, a tidy mind." Some of the more slovenly among us might bristle at this scolding old proverb, but to human evolution researchers it makes perfect sense.

Evidence exists that "humans with big brains, and perhaps great intelligence, occupied a substantial piece of southern Africa in the not very distant past, and that they eventually gave way to smaller-brained, possibly less advanced Homo sapiens—that is, ourselves."

Participants in a study who were deemed "green" conscious were found to cheat and steal more in later tests. This research adds to a recent body of knowledge known as "moral licensing".

The way our bodies—including voice, mood, posture, and so on—are influenced by surrounding bodies is one of the mysteries of human existence, but one that provides the glue that holds entire societies together.

At DarwinTunes.org, bioinformaticist Bob MacCallum and evolutionary biologist Armand Leroi of Imperial College London have devised a way to watch music evolve right before their eyes - and in doing so study the cultural analogue of biological evolution, also known as memetics.

The difference, explains USC Davis School of Gerontology Professor Caleb Finch, is that as humans evolved genes that enabled them to better adjust to levels of infection and inflammation and to the high cholesterol levels of their meat rich diets. But... these evolutionary gene …

Archaeologists claim to have found the oldest known artefact in the Americas, a scraper-like tool in an Oregon cave that dates back 14,230 years.

It is commonly assumed that larger brain size equates to higher intelligence, and human evolution is often cited as evidence of this. Lars Chittka and Jeremy Niven suggest, however, that brain organization may be more important.

From the late 19th century onwards, stories of werewolf encounters tailed away significantly, says Regal. "The spread of the idea of evolution helped kill off the werewolf because a canid-human hybrid makes no sense from an evolutionary point of view," he says.

This is a nice, elementary overview of some significant pieces of fossil evidence in the study of human evolution.

"Early hominid ancestors may have left the trees to take advantage of ground-level foods, a behavioral shift that could have resulted in two of the major defining characteristics of humans: unique teeth and walking on two legs, a mode of locomotion known as bipedalism that is ext …

"The discovery of an early human fossil in southern China may challenge the commonly held idea that modern humans originated out of Africa." ...but a number of scholars are not yet convinced.

A new Myanmar fossil primate, Ganlea megacanina, suggests the common ancestor of humans, monkeys and apes evolved from large-toothed primates in Asia and not Africa.

Mild depression might be an evolutionary adaptation, warning its sufferer that he or she is pursuing unobtainable goals.

Findings show how first Europeans transported meat over long distances A new study reveals that Neanderthals survived the often chilly conditions of Northern Europe by wearing tailored clothing and drying chunks of big game meat — like that of mammoth.

Researchers compared siblings when one was bottle fed and the other breast fed, and found that the breast fed child ended up with higher grades in high school and was more likely to attend college.

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record.

Nearly 10,000 years ago, 50 metres beneath the surface of what is now North America's Lake Huron, hunters set an ambush. Caribou were herded through stone corridors towards archers that lay waiting behind low parapets.

Skinny men have new reason to celebrate. Well, kind of. Beefcakes may be able to attract women by rippling their muscles, but the downside of all that brawn is a poor immune system and an increased appetite, a new study finds.

Brian Boyd's thesis is that current literary criticism - or "Theory" as it is hubristically known - has failed because it regards fiction purely as a cultural construct, ignoring the minds that create and consume it.

ANECDOTAL evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad.

Neandertals, the 'stupid' cousins of modern humans were capable of capturing the most impressive animals. This indicates that Neandertals were anything but dim.

Dow says his simulation, which he calls evogod, "shows that a central unifying feature of religion, a belief in an unverifiable world, could have evolved alongside of verifiable knowledge. ...

Many of the ailments afflicting humans may be a result of the differences between our modern societies and the environments of our evolutionary past. "Among the possible causes for our modern ills: super-hygiene, sedentary lifestyles, and a lack of worms in our stomachs. "

'Over thousands of generations, mutation upon mutation built up our diversity of immune cells, signals, and weapons. There was never a point at which our defenses stopped evolving, because the pathogens were evolving as well." ...

"The two sides of the brain may be a legacy that we inherited from our wormlike ancestors. But their delicate balance of symmetry and specialization is now woven into the very essence of human nature."

Did Native Americans emigrate to the New World in one wave or successive waves, or from one ancestral Asian population or a number of different populations? New evidence supports the single ancestral population theory.

"A new study challenges long-standing expectations that men are promiscuous and women tend to be more particular when it comes to choosing a mate.

Differences between modern societies and the environments of our evolutionary past may be the cause of some health problems -- in this case, allergies.

It's a mystery first of all how H. floresiensis (the "hobbit" species of the Homo genus) could develop a tool-making tradition despite its small brain size. And it's yet another mystery why modern humans that arrived later in the island of Flores adopted the same type of tools.

"Rather than confusing babies, hearing more than one language gives newborns a mental boost, according to the new study, which tested seven-month-old infants."

"Using computer simulations to analyze DNA sequence fragments from 12 Neanderthal fossils, researchers found that the species can be separated into three, or maybe four, distinct genetic groups." Groups were likely in (1) Western Europe, (2) Southern Europe near the Mediterranea …

Facebook users have lower overall grades than non-users, according to a survey of college students who also ironically said the social networking site does not interfere with studying.

Those of you who go birding will know what I am talking about when I say that birds are so capable of reading human body language that they know when we are looking at them, which frequently causes them to hide from our gaze.

A chimpanzee can likely rip your arms off, but would probably have trouble using a mouse to click on a link to the Human Evolution group in Newsvine.

For a long time, archaeologists have looked at stone tools as indicators of human development in the archaeological record.

Our awareness of tool use by non-human primates keeps improving.

Quite a few Americans oppose the idea of bailing out the bankers whose greed contributed to our current economic crisis. This, despite the fact that the bailout may be the quickest road to recovery.

"Most biologists would concur that humans have evolved the need for shared child care, but Dr. Hrdy takes it a step further, arguing that our status as cooperative breeders, rather than our exceptionally complex brains, helps explain many aspects of our temperament."

Religion might not be the only reason people buy into creationism and intelligent design, psychological experiments suggest.

Are humans naturally predisposed to violence and warfare? This article discusses the possibility that violence is in our genes, a subject being discussed at a recent U.

This is an interesting article about progress in the field of human-created life forms, and about the uses of this technology.

Scientists at the University of Reading have used a supercomputer called ThamesBlue to model the evolution of words in English and the wider family of Indo-European languages over the last 30,000 years.

Data on behavior in online social networks (like Facebook or Newsvine) is being used to test hypotheses about human social cognition.

"Until recently, there was a sexism in the study of evolution," paleoanthropologist Karen Rosenberg says.

Evolutionary anthropologists have long argued that human monogamy originated because highly dependent infants required the care of two parents. And males would only concede to a monogamous lifestyle if the female would guarantee fidelity and paternity certainty.

A strong selective force on any species is the availability of food resources, and adaptive specialization towards exploiting particular resources may have led to splitting of species.

It might sound like something out of sci-fi, but plenty of parasites can control the minds of caterpillars, roaches, crabs and maybe even us. In many cases, scientists don't know exactly how these creatures achieve mind control.

Scholars of the evolution of human behavior have long made a racy statement about human mating strategies: Females evolved to be choosy with mates, picking those with the best genetic material. And if a female's partner isn't of the best quality, she'll look outside the nest.

"Right before the great apes branched off from other apes and monkeys 10 million years ago, their DNA began to make explosive changes -- not classic mutations, but another change known as copy number variation, University of Washington geneticist Evan Eichler and colleagues found …

Interest has recently been returning to the idea of "herd psychology", and research has gotten a boost from new concepts like mirror neurons and technology like neuroimaging. This New Scientist article summarizes some recent findings.

"The oldest known human hairs could be the strands discovered in fossil hyena poop found in a South African cave, a new study hints. Researchers discovered the rock-hard hyena dung near the Sterkfontein caves, where many early human ancestor fossils have been found."

"A modern-day rush is on: for Neanderthal DNA." This article discusses some of the difficulties inherent in this line of research.

"Skin has changed color in human lineages much faster than scientists had previously supposed, even without intermarriage.

Cooperation, despite being now considered the third force of evolution, just behind mutation and natural selection, is difficult to explain in the context of an evolutionary process based on competition between individuals and selfish behaviour.

"Short people known as pygmies are scattered across equatorial Africa, where they speak various languages, inhabit different types of forests, and hunt and gather food in diverse ways.

"Over 14,000 years ago during the last Pleistocene Ice Age, when a large part of the European continent was covered in ice and snow, Neanderthals in the region of Gibraltar in the south of the Iberian peninsula were able to survive because of the refugium of plant and animal biod …

"Scientists studying the human tendency to follow the gaze of other people have found a link to the behaviour of lemurs, a distant primate relative."

Using analysis techniques from mechanical engineering, paleoanthropologist David Strait has concluded that Australopithecus africanus had jaws that were evolved to crack nuts and hard seeds.

Following the 1979 Sandinista revolution, the newly installed Nicaraguan Government inaugurated the country's first large-scale effort to educate deaf children. Hundreds of students were enrolled in two Managua schools.

Neanderthals may have been bigger and stronger than Homo sapiens, but according to this study, they couldn't throw a rock (or a spear) very far or very accurately.

2008 was a year full of important new developments in evolutionary theory, almost 150 years after Darwin (and Wallace) first proposed the idea.

"Why does storytelling endure across time and cultures? Perhaps the answer lies in our evolutionary roots. A study of the way that people respond to Victorian literature hints that novels act as a social glue, reinforcing the types of behaviour that benefit society."

"Thirteen engraved ochre pieces from Africa, many dated to 100,000 years ago, may represent an artistic or symbolic tradition, researchers suggest. If so, the timeline for the earliest known symbolic behavior must once again be redrawn."

New Scientist asked a number of top scholars what they think are the most challenging topics for future research in evolutionary biology. Answers included topics from both human and non-human species. Among humans, answers included recent human ancestors and blushing behavior.

"The skull of the so-called hobbit discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003 suggests its owner was an archaic human ancestor, not a diminutive or diseased modern human, according to a new study.

"[...] the distinction between private and public generosity is helpful in understanding what motivates people to give money to charities or donate blood, acts which are costly to the doer and primarily benefit others.

Decades of research show people tend to go along with the majority view, even if that view is objectively incorrect. Now, scientists are supporting those theories with brain images.

"By watching [several troops of Japanese macaques] acquire and maintain behavioral traditions from generation to generation, the scientists have gained insight into the cultural evolution of humans."

How can an evolutionary perspective help policy-makers improve society? "Traditionally, the answers to such questions, and many others about modern life, have been sought in philosophy, sociology, even religion. But the answers that have come back are generally unsatisfying.

Psychologists investigate: Is it more difficult for members of different races to understand each others' emotions and intentions?

"After analyzing three decades of research, Canadian scholars have concluded that religion can make people more honest while inspiring them to help people they don't know, even when that exacts a personal cost. ... "The cognitive awareness of gods is likely to heighten prosocia …

Article examaning dogs' sense of fairness

"Here's the next question in the evolution debate: We know roughly how the sequence of life ran forward in time. What about running it backward? How would you feel about rewinding human evolution to a species that's almost like us, but not quite?"

This article looks at the the relationship between evolved psychological predispositions and modern warfare.

A stalagmite rising from the floor of a cave in China is providing clues to the end of several dynasties in Chinese history. Slowly built from the minerals in dripping water over 1,810 years, chemicals in the stone tell a tale of strong and weak cycles of the monsoon, the life-giving rains that water crops to feed millions of people.

Scholars previously thought that Homo sapiens migrated out from sub-Saharan Africa (the evolutionary origin) by following the Nile river corridor. Recent paleoclimate information suggest that this may not have been the only path taken.

Tens of thousands of years of polygamy has left a mark on our genomes that is a signature that small numbers of males must have mated with lots of females.

As paleoanthropologists improve our understanding of Neanderthals, the question of why they went extinct and not us continues to grow. We've always known that Neanderthals were significantly more robust than H.

"Apes and New World primates may help us understand how highly organised and co-operative human societies have evolved and also allow human sociality to be put in to a framework whereby male tolerance and co-cooperativeness can lead to complex co-operative societies."

"[N]o other mutation seems to have had so positive a selection in the last ten thousand years as the one that creates lactose tolerance." A collaboration of European universities will study when, where, and how this trait originated, and the role of its spread through the hi …

Dogs have become more intelligent, and even learnt a sense of right and wrong, through spending time with humans, a study shows.

Displays of social emotion may be in part configured by our cultural upbringing (nurture), but our evolutionary history has likely laid the frame which culture molds.

A new study suggests that the debilitating disease schizophrenia may be a byproduct of the genetic changes that fueled the evolution of the expansive human brain.

"Homo sapiens have followed an evolutionary track away from sheer body strength and toward the lean, mean endurance qualities of a long-distance runner.

David Desteno argues that feelings of gratitude serve not just to remind us that we should repay favors, but they also cue us to pass favors on to others. This, he suggests, is part of the prosocial glue that holds society together.

Do religions exist as societal-level adaptations to reduce pathogen stress? Corey Fincher, a biologist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque believes so.

Timothy Bates tested the theory that the comparatively large human brain evolved to meet the challenges of a complex social environment.

"The brain wiring that enables vertebrates like us to vocalize probably first evolved in fish some 400 million years ago, a new study suggests.

Did the first modern humans in Europe share a bed with nearby Neanderthals? Almost certainly not, according to a new analysis of 28,000 year old Cro-Magnon DNA.

Part of our strong curiosity about chimps and other primates is the striking similarities we hold with them.

Rationality is a fundamental assumption about human behavior used in models from neoclassical economics. A question that has long nagged the discipline, however, concerns how much of human behavior actually shadows those models, and what innate divergences exist.

More children suffer from an innate condition that renders them incapable of understanding arithmetic and numbers than those who suffer dyslexia or "word blindness", according to a study of 1,500 school pupils.