When modern humans and Neanderthals interbred, thousands of slightly harmful genetic variants may have crossed into our ancestors alongside the DNA that still survives in people today
Why did some pieces of Neanderthal DNA slowly disappear while others endured for tens of thousands of years? A genome-wide search suggests the answer may lie in thousands of genetic variants so weak that almost none mattered much on their own
Long before modern humans permanently settled Europe, small groups may have entered Neanderthal territory, disappeared, and left behind fragments of their DNA that remained inside Neanderthals for a quarter of a million years
Long before modern humans permanently settled Europe, small groups may have kept entering Neanderthal territory, disappearing, and returning again, leaving behind scattered genetic and archaeological traces that are only now beginning to fit together
Europe once carried more Neanderthal DNA than Asia, but a later wave of early farmers quietly reversed that ancient genetic pattern
Long after most late Neanderthals were exchanging genes across Europe, one small community appears to have remained genetically isolated for roughly 50,000 years until the very end
Long after a Roman public toilet fell out of use, someone carefully transformed one of its abandoned drainage channels into a shared grave for two premature infants, raising unexpected questions about why this forgotten place became their final resting place
Bronze Age people buried with boat-shaped coffins, wool clothing, dairy foods, and crops from across Eurasia turned out to share the DNA of an ancient local population that had remained isolated for thousands of years
The farther the sea pushed Malta away from Sicily and the smaller the island became, the more puzzling it became that people continued reaching it for at least a thousand years, forcing researchers to ask whether generations of hunter-gatherers kept making repeated open-water journeys across an ever-widening Mediterranean crossing
Again and again, a carefully engineered quantum signal faded almost to nothing before returning, and every disappearance landed where one of mathematics’ most mysterious numbers was expected to be
Why do certain childhood smells stay so vivid for decades? This study followed one pleasant scent from early life and found that every familiar encounter seemed to keep the memory alive even as the brain quietly handed it from one neural network to another over time
As grocery shelves fill with protein-packed foods and millions of people deliberately eat more protein for healthier aging, scientists are uncovering evidence that cutting back on protein—or even limiting just a few specific amino acids—may switch on many of the same biological programs that calorie restriction has long been known to activate
For six weeks, people with low-fiber diets simply added a blend of more than 30 whole plant ingredients to their usual meals, and by the end their gut microbes had reorganized far more extensively than those of people taking a probiotic or eating bread croutons—despite most other health measures staying much the same
Long before chronic kidney disease forces people onto dialysis, the kidneys’ microscopic filters may already be responding to an unexpected internal cannabinoid signaling network that can either accelerate damage or help tissues recover—yet the deeper scientists look, the less this biological system behaves like the simple on-and-off switch they once imagined
Hours after the asteroid that ended the age of dinosaurs struck Earth, a vast cloud of microscopic rock dust may have turned the atmosphere into a giant heat trap that reflected the returning blast of heat back toward the surface, making the first catastrophic hours even more dangerous than scientists had realized
The light from IC 1101 fades so gradually into the darkness of space that astronomers struggled to tell where the galaxy actually ends, until ultra-deep observations peeled away deceptive scattered starlight and revealed a long-hidden boundary surrounded by an even larger ghostly envelope stretching hundreds of thousands of light-years farther
When scientists noticed that several ancient skulls were unusually lopsided, they began to wonder whether the distortion had formed while these vulnerable infants were still alive and unable to control their own heads
For more than a century this ancient dog looked like it should have run across open ground, but when its missing skeleton finally emerged it told the story of a patient ambush hunter that hid before it struck
Neptune’s tiny inner moons should never have been able to make the water-formed minerals coating their frozen surfaces, leaving scientists to wonder whether these overlooked worlds are actually the shattered remains of ancient moons whose hidden interiors have survived a catastrophic destruction
For more than 4,000 years, prehistoric graves across Europe preserved haunting scenes of adults and children buried in close embraces that looked like mothers cradling their offspring, yet ancient DNA is now revealing that many of these intimate burials concealed far more unexpected family relationships than anyone had imagined
