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 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
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
For thousands of years, a Stone Age cemetery on Sweden’s Baltic island of Gotland quietly preserved an extraordinary pattern of children, parents, siblings, and even more distant relatives sharing the same graves, yet the hidden logic behind these carefully repeated burials remained invisible until ancient DNA reconstructed the family connections that archaeology alone could never see
Two brothers shared the same ancient family lineage, yet one was given a lavish central tomb while the other was buried more than 200 meters away at the cemetery’s edge, revealing how wealth and status could divide even the closest relatives in Xiongnu society
For nearly two centuries on the Mongolian steppe, members of the same ancient families returned to the same cemetery, yet some were buried at its center in elaborate tombs while others were pushed to the margins, leaving researchers to uncover what really determined a person’s place among the dead
Two brothers shared the same ancient bloodline, yet one was buried beside his wife in a lavish central tomb while the other was sent more than 200 meters away to the cemetery’s edge
Along the Angara River, families buried their children and relatives one after another roughly 5,500 years ago, and ancient DNA from their teeth now reveals how a mysterious plague swept through these mobile hunter-gatherer communities in a matter of decades
A narrow slash across the jaw of a 90,000-year-old human skeleton seemed easy to overlook, but modern scans revealed that the wound cut through both bone and tooth—and that the person survived long enough for the injury to begin healing
Stonehenge’s six-ton Altar Stone may have spent thousands of years stranded on a vanished landscape beneath the North Sea before prehistoric people carried it the rest of the way, according to a new investigation into one of archaeology’s oldest transportation mysteries
Long before anyone measured moonlight, ancient Egyptians chose a silver-gray baboon to embody their moon god, and now its shimmering fur appears to carry the same light that inspired a civilization
For more than 1,500 years, a quiet cave high above the Himalayan valleys preserved the remains of people whose DNA carried an almost perfectly balanced blend of ancient Tibetan and North Indian ancestry, inviting a new look at when two worlds first came together across one of Earth’s most formidable mountain landscapes
Thousands of years after Neanderthals disappeared, some of the genetic fragments they left behind became concentrated in one unexpected corner of the human genome, where they are still closely linked to the way fats are processed today
Inside a cave near present-day Beijing, the bones of a person who lived about 40,000 years ago preserved just enough DNA to reveal that the ancestors of present-day Europeans and Asians had already begun following different evolutionary paths
