Discover the latest news, features and articles about the origin of the human species and what makes us different from our ...

From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture ...

Findings suggest that new genes can form by repurposing fragments of ancestral genes while incorporating entirely new coding regions (the protein-coding parts of the DNA). This innovative concept ...

Researchers Gregory Goldman, Gregory Fournier, and Betul Kacar have identified a rare class of ancient gene families, called ...

De novo gene evolution describes the process by which entirely new genes originate from previously non-coding DNA rather than from the duplication and divergence of existing genetic material. This ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...

Life’s story may stretch further back than scientists once thought. Some genes found in nearly every organism today were already duplicated before all life shared a common ancestor. By tracking these ...

“This DNA repair and replication activity supports a fascinating mechanism called premeiotic endoreplication, a process through which the snake duplicates its chromosomes before dividing them, ...