Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Study reveals rapid evolution of common brain neurons may explain autism’s high prevalence in humans (CREDIT: Shutterstock) What ...

A study of 225 newborns suggests prenatal estrogen may have played a role in the evolution of larger human brains. Boys with ...

For decades, large stretches of human DNA were dismissed as "junk" and considered to serve no real purpose. In a new study published in Cell Genomics, researchers at Lund University in Sweden show ...

Our brains are large compared with other animals, so it is tempting to assume there was an evolutionary advantage to them – but that may not be true at all ...

A new Yale study provides a fuller picture of the genetic changes that shaped the evolution of the human brain, and how the process differed from the evolution of chimpanzees. For the study, published ...

Researchers discovered that autism’s prevalence may be linked to human brain evolution. Specific neurons in the outer brain evolved rapidly, and autism-linked genes changed under natural selection.

The placenta and the hormones it produces may have played a crucial role in the evolution of the human brain, while also leading to the behavioral traits that have made human societies able to thrive ...

For most of human evolution, the story of the brain seemed to move in one direction. It got bigger. That long rise is still there in the fossil record. But a new analysis argues that the trend did not ...

How did humans get such big brains – the answer might lie in the gut. A recent study from Northwestern University in the US is the first to show that gut microbes from different animals can shape ...

It wasn’t the size of human brains that distinguished people from apes, he theorized, but the way they were organized. He found a creative way to prove it. By Adam Nossiter See more of our coverage in ...

What unique processes conspire to create a healthy, functional human brain? How can we be so genetically similar to, say, chimpanzees, and yet be light-years more sophisticated cognitively and ...

Humans, who are classified among the five great apes, are closest genetically, i.e., DNA similarity, to chimpanzees (98.8%-99%) and bonobos (98.8%). [Blueringmedia ...