A deeper understanding of how DNA changes over generations helps scientists learn why people differ and how diseases develop. Until recently, many fast-changing parts of the human genome remained ...

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 ...

Ancient DNA has revealed that a common childhood herpesvirus was infecting—and even embedding itself into human genomes—thousands of years ago. The findings show a deep, shared evolutionary history ...

Ancient DNA is turning human evolution into a crime scene reconstruction, and one of the prime suspects is a herpesvirus that quietly slipped into our chromosomes and never left. By tracing this viral ...

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 ...