A new study reveals that early human ancestors nearly went extinct between 930,000 and 813,000 years ago, with just 1,280 survivors enduring harsh conditions and influencing the genetic makeup of ...

In a nutshell All modern humans share DNA from two ancient populations that split 1.5 million years ago and reunited through ...

It raises the possibility that a climate-driven bottleneck helped split early humans into two evolutionary lineages — one that eventually gave rise to Neanderthals, the other to modern humans.

A lost chapter in human evolution has been revealed after an analysis of modern DNA found that we come from not one but two ancestral populations—ones that drifted apart and later reconnected ...

An ancestral human species faced a startling population bottleneck and teetered on the brink of extinction around 800,000 years ago, according to new research.

The human population may have lingered at about 1,300 for more than 100,000 years, and that population bottleneck could have fueled the divergence between modern humans, Neanderthals and Denisovans.

Almost 99% of all human ancestors may have been wiped out around 930,000 years ago, a new paper has claimed. The new research, published in the journal Science, used DNA from living people to suggest ...

Biological science has made such astonishing leaps in the last few decades, such as precise gene editing, that scientists are ...

The estimated bottleneck period is too old to yield any ancient DNA—at least with current methods. The oldest hominin DNA yet recovered is only 400,000 years old.

Human DNA recovered from remains found in Europe is revealing our species’ shared history with Neanderthals. The trove is the oldest Homo sapiens DNA ever documented, scientists say.

Neandertal DNA may affect the color of our skin and hair, how readily our blood clots, our propensity for heart disease, and how our cells respond to various environmental stressors such as radiation.

Scientists have long debated how modern humans evolved. For decades, most researchers agreed that Homo sapiens came from one ancestral group in Africa, dating back 200,000 to 300,000 years. But ...