Ten millennia ago, there were about six million people on Earth. Today, there are six billion. This thousandfold increase in the global population is often thought to be linked to...

Most experts agree that the earliest examples of farming and animal domestication lie in the aptly named Fertile Crescent, in present day Iraq.   But still many questions have lingered...

Almost since the 1871 publication of “The Descent of Man,” in which Charles Darwin applied his theory of natural selection to the human species, biologists have argued over whether the...

Before genetics came into the picture, researchers interested in the introduction of agriculture to Europe had only the archaeological record to go on – a limited collection of primarily stone...

Archaeologists rarely agree on anything.   So it’s no surprise that for years two groups of scholars have drawn completely opposite conclusions about the relationship between the ancient people of...

Throughout the history of our species there has been one constant:   movement.   Since the origin of Homo sapiens nearly 200,000 years ago in East Africa, humans have journeyed...

This guest post is by Roy King, who is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and a research colleague of Stanford geneticist and 23andMe scientific adviser Peter Underhill. Roy...