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Built to Survive, Prone to Suffer: How Human Evolution Shapes Modern Health
Why do our bodies come with so many trade-offs—like back pain, difficult childbirth, or diseases linked to inflammation? Our newest CARTA series Mismatch: Human Origins and Modern Disease explores how different traits in the human body evolve over time—some as early as 1.5 billion years ago—and how those adaptations continue to affect our health today.…
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We Are All Africans
Svante Pääbo once said, “We are all Africans, either living in Africa or in recent exile from Africa.” It is now abundantly clear that Africa was the “cradle of humanity,” with multiple waves of hominins arising on that continent and spreading across the old world, eventually being effectively displaced by our own species, which also…
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What Happened When Modern Humans Met Neanderthals?
In short, they interbred, according to Svante Pääbo, a Swedish biologist and pioneer of paleogenetics, the study of preserved genetic material from the remains of ancient organisms, including ancient human DNA. He has served as director of the Department of Evolutionary Genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, since 1997.…