Deep inside a handful of caves, scientists are pulling genetic secrets out of bones, teeth and even the surrounding dirt, and the results are upending what we thought we knew about our own species.

Most people alive today carry fragments of Neanderthal DNA in their genome. Now scientists are gaining a more intimate ...

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 ...

What is that how can a tooth survive the years and bear any intelligible mark of the molecules on its side when bone and other soft tissue have long since decayed? In the case of ancient-DNA, teeth ...