Over the past 12,000 years, humans in Europe have dramatically increased their ability to digest carbohydrates, expanding the number of genes they have for enzymes that break down starch from an ...

A just-published article in the journal Nature—“Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia,” (Akbari et al, 15 April 2026)—describes how the development of agriculture in ...

Humans take nearly 18 to 25 years to reach full maturity, far longer than most mammals. This slow human growth is driven by ...

Scientists have suspected that modern humans have more genes to digest starch than our hunter-gatherer ancestors, but the amylase locus of the genome is hard to study. Researchers have now developed ...