Brain & behaviour

A 100 year old Neanderthal skeleton was plagued with health conditions like scoliosis. Their continued survival shows Neanderthals cared for their sick.

Wherever humans went, extinction often followed. New Zealand was no exception, where the giant moa was wiped out. But local populations still remember them.

A new hypothesis suggests that becoming hairless drove the evolution of our big brains, as it was forced to adapt to the new sensations of a naked body

Researchers have managed to reconstruct the Homo naledi brain from fossils, revealing it was surprisingly small yet shared many modern features with us.

When humans arrived in a region it was often bad news for local animals. However, the mammoth escaped our wrath. Were ancient people protecting the animals?

Modern humans evolved around 300,000 years ago. New research suggests that the human brain didn’t evolve until much later, after at least 100,000 years ago.

Research on which paw cats prefer to use reveals females end to be right-handed, males left-handed. More importantly, these discoveries challenge many hypotheses we had about why hand preferences might evolve.

Neanderthals DNA has been recovered from individuals who lived after humans arrived in the region. Despite this, they lack signs of human DNA suggesting these Neanderthals avoided mating with us.

Macaques are the second most successful primate species on the planet (after humans). New research reveals the secret to their success is that more females survive to adulthood. Could something similar explain human success?

The Neanderthal extinction has often been explained by innate differences between our species. However, new research suggests our success may have been due to circumstance rather than birth.