When he was a doctoral student at the University of Copenhagen, Eske Willerslev was a nobody. At least, that’s how it seemed to the budding evolutionary geneticist, who was unable to lay his hands on ...

Researchers have identified gene-regulatory variants that might have contributed to Neanderthals’ beefy jaws — offering a window on how the human face developed 1. This ‘non-coding’ sequence controls ...

Ancient DNA is turning human prehistory into something startlingly intimate. Instead of a clean handoff from one species to another, the last 50,000 years look more like a long, tangled story of ...