Lead exposure may have spelled evolutionary success for humans—and extinction for our ancient cousins—but other scientists are casting doubt on the headline-making study Birds Make an Alarm Call That ...

Language is one of the few faculties that still seems to be uniquely human. Other animals, like chimpanzees and songbirds, have developed elaborate communication systems, but none appears to convey ...

From epic poetry to game shows, from Stone Age axes to spaceflight, humans have the most complex cultures of any species on Earth. Since the time of Darwin, scientists have suspected that this culture ...

Long before factories, mines, and cars filled the air with pollution, our distant ancestors were already living with a silent toxin: lead. A groundbreaking study reveals that hominids — from early ...

A new study suggests that the NOVA1 gene may have been a key player in the evolution of human language. By Carl Zimmer Scientists have long struggled to understand how human language evolved. Words ...

A recent study proposes a new paradigm for understanding the role of carrion in the subsistence of human populations ...

Fossilized human teeth spanning two million years of evolution had shockingly high contents of lead, which may have been the ...

Lead poisoning isn’t just an industrial-age problem. A new study reveals our ancestors, including Neanderthals, were exposed ...

Our brains evolved for complex thought and language - but the same genes that made us smarter may have increased mental illness risk.