Modern humans, Neanderthals, and other recent relatives on our human family tree evolved bigger brains much more rapidly than earlier species, a new study of human brain evolution has found. The study ...

A 1.6-million-year-old Ethiopian skull blends ancestor and descendant features, rewriting the origin story of Homo erectus.

It wasn’t the size of human brains that distinguished people from apes, he theorized, but the way they were organized. He found a creative way to prove it. By Adam Nossiter Ralph Holloway, an ...

Could social bonds be the key to human big brains? A study of the fossil teeth of early Homo from Georgia dating back 1.77 million years reveals a prolonged childhood despite a small brain and an ...

Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) often strikes our most human traits, such as the ability to speak and to interact on social and emotional levels. Now, research led by Lorenzo Pasquini and William Seeley ...

Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection.

The placenta and the hormones it produces may have played a crucial role in the evolution of the human brain, while also leading to the behavioral traits that have made human societies able to thrive ...

The brain does not merely recognize the human voice. A study from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) shows that certain areas ...

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) may be the result of millions of years of evolution. Rapid neuronal evolution in humans is likely ASD’s genetic cause, new research suggests. Though autism can cause ...

Researchers have used a new human reference genome, which includes many duplicated and repeat sequences left out of the original human genome draft, to identify genes that make the human brain ...