Image: Marcia Ponce de León and Christoph Zollikofer/University of Zürich One of the things that makes our species unique is our exceptionally large brain relative to body size. Brain size more than ...

A new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...

What makes us human, and where does this mysterious property of “humanness” come from? Humans are genetically similar to chimpanzees and bonobos, yet there exist obvious behavioral and cognitive ...

Longer thumbs mean bigger brains, scientists have found—revealing how human hands and minds evolved together. Researchers studied 94 different primate species, including fossils and living animals, to ...

Human evolution has long been tied to growing brain size, and new research suggests prenatal hormones may have played a surprising role. By studying the relative lengths of index and ring fingers — a ...

Flight is a rare skill in the animal world. Among vertebrates, it evolved only three times: in bats, birds, and the long-extinct pterosaurs. Pterosaurs were the pioneers, taking to the skies more than ...

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 ...

Professor Steve Gentleman poses with a human brain at the Multiple Sclerosis and Parkinson’s UK Tissue Bank at Imperial College London, June 3, 2016. Reuters/Neil Hall Humans, specifically Homo ...