Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui, is located in the easternmost corner of the Polynesian Triangle. It is one of the most isolated locations on Earth inhabited by humans. Archaeological and genetic evidence suggests that the island was first colonized by Polynesians around AD 1200. After

Cat owners will recognise the purr of pleasure from their pets when they are tickled behind the ears, but a new analysis comparing the domestic cat’s genome with that of its wild relatives suggests this may also have been key to taming the animals in the first place. The analysis has identified

DNA from a roughly 37,000-year-old Homo sapiens skeleton supports recent findings about when ancient humans and Neandertals interbred and other details about human evolution. In October, scientists reported on ancient DNA that suggested Neandertals and Homo sapiens hooked up between 50,000 and

One of the challenges with treating psychiatric disorders is finding a way to study them outside of the human brain. When there is no fundamental understanding of how a disease works, it becomes that much harder to find comparable symptoms in an animal or cell. And when you’re working with diseases

SAN DIEGO — Britons might not be Anglo-Saxons, a genetic analysis of five ancient skeletons hints. When archaeological digs revealed ancient graves on the grounds of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, researchers there took it as a sign that they should analyze the ancient