Bronze Age desert dwellers unearthed from graves in what’s now northwest China were buried with cheese scattered on their heads and necks — perhaps as a snack packed for the afterlife. A decade after ...

A 4,500-year-old burial in Middle Egypt has reshaped what scientists know about ancient Egyptian origins. Inside a sealed ...

Buried in the desert for roughly 4,500 years, the skeleton of a single Egyptian man has yielded a complete genome that ...

Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel Prize for medicine for pioneering the use of ancient DNA to unlock secrets about human evolution. Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo has won the Nobel ...

Footprints left on a beach. Air breathed in a busy room. Ocean water. Scientists have been able to collect and analyze detailed genetic data from human DNA from all these places, raising thorny ...

In a spectacular bit of science, a group of scientists has sequenced the DNA from the femur of a man who died 45,000 years ago. The femur they studied is over 20 times older than this 2000 year old ...

When once-living tissue is preserved in a cold, dry environment, fragments of its DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years. In fact, DNA doesn't even have to remain in tissue; we've managed ...