Genes make us who we are—but are they shaped by chance, natural selection, or something else?

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

A 150,000-year-old site in Côte d'Ivoire nearly doubles previous estimates of how long ago humans first lived in rainforests.

Mosquitoes haven’t always had a taste for human blood — partly because the tiny yet dangerous insects have been around a lot longer than humans. Pinpointing when mosquitoes shifted their preference to ...

A groundbreaking archaeological discovery in West Africa is challenging long-held assumptions about early human adaptability and migration. Evidence from a site in Côte d'Ivoire reveals that Homo ...

The museum’s groundbreaking Hall of Human Origins centers around the adaptations that set early humans apart Jack Tamisiea What does it mean to be human? This question, deceptively simple and imbued ...

Food processing has been a part of human adaptation since deep in the past. The softening and breaking down of food left its testimony on the human body. For example, the massive teeth of our early ...

When Anna Dhody was growing up in Philadelphia, in the nineteen-eighties, her mother used the city’s museums as a kind of babysitter. “She would just drop me off at the Penn Museum and be, like, ...