In a remarkable turn of events, scientists have stumbled upon non-human DNA from ancient fossils, shaking the very foundations of our understanding of human evolution and our ancestral lineage.

“Modern humans were essentially like waves crashing on a beach, slowly but steadily eroding the beach away.” With this vivid simile, Princeton geneticist Joshua Akey describes a process that, until ...

The human genome is made up of 23 pairs of chromosomes, the biological blueprints that make humans … well, human. But it turns out that some of our DNA — about 8% — are the remnants of ancient viruses ...