A plague that swept through Eurasia for 2,000 years – millennia before the Black Death of the Middle Ages – has only ever ...

Scientists have unraveled how an early form of Bronze Age plague that differed from the Black Death spread across Europe.

Sediment DNA also traces life outside the cave. Predators dragged prey into sheltered chambers, humans left waste behind. By following changes in human, animal and microbial DNA over time, researchers ...

Animals that hibernate are incredibly resilient. They can spend months without food or water, muscles refusing to atrophy, body temperature dropping to near freezing as their metabolism and brain ...

Diseases started jumping from animals to humans at least 6,500 years ago, researchers found in a new study of ancient DNA. After analyzing ancient DNA from 1,313 prehistoric humans from Europe and ...

Every household dog, from a towering Great Dane to a trembling toy breed, traces back to wild wolves. New genetic work shows that this ancestry is not just a distant story but a living imprint in ...

The modern house cat reached China in the 8th century. Before that, another cat — the leopard cat — hunted the rodents in ancient Chinese settlements.

Thousands of years ago, ancient humans undertook a treacherous journey, crossing hundreds of miles of ice over the Bering Strait to the unknown world of the Americas. Now, a new study led by the ...