Men may usually settle it over a drunken brawl in the pub or perhaps a verbal spat – but new evidence has shown for the first time that fighting over women in prehistoric times could have been worse than that.

The normal human genome contains 46 chromosomes: 23 from the mother and 23 from the father. Thus, you have two copies of every gene (excluding some irregularity in the pair of sex chromosomes). In general, which parent contributes a chromosome has no effect on the expression of the genes found on it.

Lice from 1,000-year-old mummies in Peru may unravel important clues about a different sort of passage: the migration patterns of America’s earliest humans, a new University of Florida study suggests.

The human spine evolved differently in males and females in order to alleviate back pressure from the weight of carrying a baby, according to research spearheaded at The University of Texas at Austin.

Researchers discovered genetic evidence that human evolution is speeding up – and has not halted or proceeded at a constant rate, as had been thought – indicating that humans on different continents are becoming increasingly different.

From 135,000 to 90,000 years ago tropical Africa had megadroughts more extreme and widespread than any previously known for that region, according to new research.

If anything sets humans apart from other animals, it must surely be our way with words. For something so ubiquitous, our gift for gab still has strangely obscure roots. The appearance of language has been ascribed to factors ranging from finer control over our voices, the evolution of a grammar module in the brain, even the shift to a meat-based diet that fuels more gray matter.

The earliest humans almost certainly walked upright on two legs but may have struggled to run at even half the speed of modern man, new research suggests.

To think that world domination could have begun in the cheeks. That's one interpretation of a discovery, published online September 9 in Nature Genetics, which indicates that humans carry extra copies of the salivary amylase gene.

Several genes with strong associations to schizophrenia have evolved rapidly due to selection during human evolution, according to new research in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Wednesday 5 September 2007).

Stanford scientists show in a forthcoming paper that traditional mating patterns make men the key to explaining away the “wall of death,” an enduring puzzle in the study of human longevity.

Is heading straight for a goal the quickest way there" If the name of the game is evolution, suggests new research at the Weizmann Institute of Science, the pace might speed up if the goals themselves change continuously.