Four billion years ago, Earth was violent, hot, and unstable. Yet new research suggests that by then, life had already reached a surprising level of complexity. At that time lived the last universal ...

The closest living relatives of humans are the apes such as chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons. We all had the same common ancestor that lived during the Miocene epoch (23 million to 5 ...

Recent fossil finds could mean that "Lucy" wasn't our direct ancestor, some scientists say. Others strongly disagree.

The mystery of life’s beginnings has long captivated scientists. Central to that search is LUCA—the last universal common ancestor. LUCA sits at the root of the evolutionary tree, where two great ...

Tuna, salmon, mackerel. I’ve never looked at my afternoon sushi and wondered if it’s related to humans. So, I asked one of those friends named Thomas Siek. He’s a biological anthropologist at ...

All blue-eyed individuals living today are necessarily descended from one individual. Such a framing must be weighed against the fact that every single human alive today is likely descended from that ...

Genus-level tree of modern mammals, all of which descended from a common ancestor, with some of Australia's odd marsupials like the platypus, kangaroo and koala among the earliest to diverge OrthoMaM ...