The human brain grew from a survival machine into the most complex organ on Earth—fueling language, culture, and technology.

More than a decade after the first Neanderthal genome was sequenced, scientists are still working to understand how ...

A 1.6-million-year-old Ethiopian skull blends ancestor and descendant features, rewriting the origin story of Homo erectus.

Researchers have used a new human reference genome, which includes many duplicated and repeat sequences left out of the original human genome draft, to identify genes that make the human brain ...

The placenta and the hormones it produces may have played a crucial role in the evolution of the human brain, while also leading to the behavioral traits that have made human societies able to thrive ...

What unique processes conspire to create a healthy, functional human brain? How can we be so genetically similar to, say, chimpanzees, and yet be light-years more sophisticated cognitively and ...

Modern humans, Neanderthals, and other recent relatives on our human family tree evolved bigger brains much more rapidly than earlier species, a new study of human brain evolution has found. The study ...

How did humans get such big brains – the answer might lie in the gut. A recent study from Northwestern University in the US is the first to show that gut microbes from different animals can shape ...

"Consciousness," although challenging to define, can be thought of as a first-person awareness of one's surroundings and oneself. You sense the world through your eyes, nose, ears and hands, and track ...

From the plains of the Pleistocene to the age of smartphones, the human brain has evolved but never forgotten its roots. Many of our instincts and quirks are echoes of our ancestors.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be the result of millions of years of evolution. Rapid neuronal evolution in humans is likely ASD’s genetic cause, new research suggests. Though autism can cause ...

If we look across the whole of the mammal branch of the tree of life, we find there are many groups of mammals that have ...