With fossils and DNA, scientists are piecing together a picture of humanity’s beginnings, an origin story with more twists than anything you would find at the movie theater.

The expert consensus now is that Homo sapiens evolved at least 300,000 years ago in Africa. Only much later — roughly 70,000 years ago — did a small group of Africans establish themselves on other continents, giving rise to other populations of people today.

To Johannes Krause, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human History in Germany, that gap seems peculiar.

Continue reading “In Neanderthal DNA, Signs of a Mysterious Human Migration” →

Mark D. Zabel wants to set some fires.

Dr. Zabel and his colleagues are developing plans to burn plots of National Park Service land in Arkansas and Colorado. If the experiments turn out as the researchers hope, they will spare some elk and deer a gruesome death.

Across a growing swath of North America, these animals are dying from a mysterious disorder called chronic wasting disease. It’s caused not by a virus or bacterium, but a deformed protein called a prion.

Continue reading “Fire May Be the Only Remedy for a Plague Killing Deer and Elk” →

A common genetic mutation is linked to an increase in life span of about 10 years among men, researchers reported on Friday.

The mutation, described in the journal Science Advances, did not seem to have any effect on women. Still, it joins a short list of gene variants shown to influence human longevity.

By studying these genes, scientists may be able to design drugs to mimic their effects and slow aging. But the search for them has been slow and hard.

Continue reading “Scientists Discover a Key to a Longer Life in Male DNA” →