Traces of ancient empires that stretched across Africa remain in the DNA of people living on the continent, reveals a new genetics study. Traces of ancient empires that stretched across Africa remain ...

Africa has long been known as the cradle of humanity. Fossils, tools and genetics all point there. Yet the deeper story of how the first modern humans lived, moved and mixed has stayed blurry. Too ...

The human genome is a rich, complex record of migration, encounters, and inheritance written over thousands of millennia.

New research reveals that ancient interbreeding between humans and Neanderthals shaped our modern human DNA - especially on the X chromosome.

Human history is written in DNA. Where our ancestors lived and who they loved—the story is right there if we can see into their genes. The trouble is that the ravages of climate and time degrade DNA, ...

More than 60,000 years ago, early humans in southern Africa were carving patterns onto ostrich eggshells—and new research shows these designs were far more sophisticated than previously believed. A ...

Mandible of a hunter-gatherer woman who lived 7900 years ago at Matjes River Rockshelter in the Western Cape, South Africa, for whom a genome was reconstructed. In one of the largest African ...

Chapurukha M. Kusimba received funding for this research from the Field Museum of Natural History, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright ...