How did the "false horse," Thoatherium, and its relatives survive when their hoofed legs seemed to be adapted for an ecosystem that wouldn't exist for another 12 million years?

Due to an odd quirk of genetics and some unique evolutionary circumstances, two humans who lived at different times in the distant past managed to pass on a very small fraction of their genomes to you. And to me. To all of us.

There was a group of hominins, those creatures more closely related to us than to chimpanzees, that did take a different, parallel journey from our ancestors. Our paths ran beside each other - and potentially even crossed at times - but while ours led us...

Today, chilis are the most widely cultivated spice crop in the world - grown everywhere from their native home in the Americas to Europe, Africa, and Asia. But how and why did chilis evolve this weird, fiery trick in the first place? And why did we learn...

It would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.

To get fire, which exists only on Earth, it took billions of years of photosynthesis – which means fire can’t exist without life. And fire and life have been shaping each other ever since.

Today, billions of people around the world start their day with caffeine. But how and why did the ability to produce this molecule independently evolve in multiple, distantly-related lineages of flowering plants, again and again?

In between two of the islands of Indonesia, there’s an ancient line that is both real and…not real.

Thanks to a recent adaptation, instead of getting sick from the boozy, fermented fruits, one of our primate ancestors could digest them safely, and get more calories at the same time. This new superpower would open up a whole new nutritional landscape for...

These relatives of ours lived in Eurasia for more than 300,000 years. They were expert toolmakers, using materials like stone, wood, and animal bone. They were also skilled hunters and foragers, and may even have created cave art. So what caused the decli...

The life and times of the human. We will forever be discovering new truths about ourselves and how we came to be who we are as a species; but there is so much we already know.

Mercury, Venus, and Mars are all super low on water – so where did ours come from and why do we have so much of it? We think our water came from a few unlikely sources: meteorites, space dust, and even the sun.