A stunning discovery buried deep inside a cave for 1.8 million years is rewriting the story of human evolution.

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

Around 74,000 years ago, Earth experienced one of the most devastating volcanic events in its recent history. The Toba supereruption, centered in what is now Indonesia, blasted 672 cubic miles of ...

For the first time, scientists have reconstructed the ancient genomes of human betaherpesvirus 6A and 6B (HHV-6A/B) from archaeological human remains more than two millennia old. The study, led by the ...

An algorithm scanned 78 million genetic variants and found patterns that shouldn't exist. Most human DNA tells a familiar story—but some of it defies explanation. Researchers discovered genetic ...

Mosquitoes haven’t always had a taste for human blood — partly because the tiny yet dangerous insects have been around a lot longer than humans. Pinpointing when mosquitoes shifted their preference to ...

The museum’s groundbreaking Hall of Human Origins centers around the adaptations that set early humans apart Jack Tamisiea What does it mean to be human? This question, deceptively simple and imbued ...

Food processing has been a part of human adaptation since deep in the past. The softening and breaking down of food left its testimony on the human body. For example, the massive teeth of our early ...

Walking on two legs has long been considered a milestone in human evolution and one of our most defining characteristics. Until now, researchers assumed that the first humans originated in Africa and ...

When Anna Dhody was growing up in Philadelphia, in the nineteen-eighties, her mother used the city’s museums as a kind of babysitter. “She would just drop me off at the Penn Museum and be, like, ...