Early humans called Denisovans lived in a remote mountain cave between 100,000 and 60,000 years ago, and possibly longer still, raising intriguing questions about their relationship to modern humans.
The arrangement of bones in our specimen’s fins are the same as those of ‘fingers’ in tetrapods. The only difference is the digits are locked within the fin, and not free moving.
Capuchin monkeys in Brazil use big stones to crush the shells of nuts they want to eat. An experiment in the field investigated how these monkeys prepare to use new, unfamiliar tools.
Quentin Wheeler, State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry; Antonio G. Valdecasas, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), dan Cristina Cánovas, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
If you go by editorial cartoons and T-shirts, you might have the impression that evolution proceeds as an orderly march toward a preordained finish line. But that’s not right at all.
A male guppy looks good when he looks different.
Mitchel Daniel
The mating habits of these tiny, colorful fish may be revealing something broader about the animal kingdom, and perhaps even our own desires.
Examining chicken intestines, reading the tea leaves, watching the markets – people turn to experts for insight into the mysteries that surround them.
Manvir Singh
Hidden forces are always at work in the world, and people always want to control them, a cognitive anthropologist explains. Enter the human universal of shamanism.
We’re having less sex than we used to.
Toa Heftiba
An evolutionary biologist visits the remote jungle mountaintop where a little-known naturalist wrote his insightful paper about the mechanisms of evolution that spurred on a rivalrous Charles Darwin.
Birds don’t fly across wide Amazonian rivers like the Rio Negro.
Marcos Amend www.marcosamend.com (for use with this article only)
Rivers are natural boundaries for evolving populations. But scientists don’t agree whether they create new species or just help maintain them. Research using birds’ molecular clocks provides some answers.
What drives the emergence and disappearance of species? By modeling the fundamental processes of evolution and ecology on geographical scales, new research spotlights topography and climatic shifts.