The textbook assumption is that when the first modern humans arrived in Europe, around 45,000 years ago, they quickly evolved pale skin to adapt to the region’s dimmer sunlight relative to Africa. The ...

The Minoans, the builders of Europe's first advanced civilization, really were European, new research suggests. The conclusion, published today (May 14) in the journal Nature Communications, was drawn ...

Domestic cats first joined European communities around 2,000 years ago, during the age of Roman power, not in deep prehistory ...

Around 5,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Bronze Age, a mass migration of peoples from the grasslands of the Eurasian steppe poured into Europe. Called the Yamnaya, these horse herders introduced ...

DNA analysis is unearthing the origins of the Minoans, who some 5,000 years ago established the first advanced Bronze Age civilization in present-day Crete. The findings suggest they arose from an ...

52.9. I’d never given much thought to this arrangement of numbers until a few months ago. Those digits represent a majority of my ancestral makeup. During a recent DNA examination, I discovered that ...

Scientific studies aimed at unlocking the genetic code of all humans have had problems with their data: it was mostly collected from people with “European” heritage, leaving wide gaps in the study of ...

Despite the ubiquity of cats in modern homes, we still don't know many details about the timing and routes of early cat domestication and dispersal into Europe and beyond, aside from the common ...

Human gene maps contain major blind spots because they were built largely from the DNA sequences of people with European ...

In 1495, a devastating infection began to sweep across Europe, causing pustules and sores to erupt on people’s bodies and faces. Accusatory finger-pointing about the scourge, syphilis, began almost ...