In genetics, scientists must analyze the genomes of millions, if not billions, of people, each carrying millions of variants.

Scientists have long debated how modern humans evolved. For decades, most researchers agreed that Homo sapiens came from one ancestral group in Africa, dating back 200,000 to 300,000 years. But new ...

Scientists read ancient DNA from South African hunter gatherers and found a very early human branch that shaped survival ...

When cells proliferate, genomic DNA is precisely duplicated once per cell cycle. Abnormalities in this DNA replication ...

I have spent years covering discoveries that nudge our origin story around the edges, but the sequencing of DNA from one of the very last Neanderthals does something different: it rewrites the center ...

The moment a creature dies, its DNA begins to break down. Half of it degrades every 521 years on average. By about 6.8 million years, even under ideal preservation conditions in cold, stable ...

Sediment DNA also traces life outside the cave. Predators dragged prey into sheltered chambers, humans left waste behind. By following changes in human, animal and microbial DNA over time, researchers ...

A Europe-focused study published in the journal Science examined 87 ancient and modern cat genomes and found that the domestic cat, which has the scientific name Felis catus, originated in North ...