Buried in the desert for roughly 4,500 years, the skeleton of a single Egyptian man has yielded a complete genome that redraws the map of the ancient world. His DNA captures a moment when people from ...

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 ...

Ancient DNA shows that hunter-gatherers in northwestern Europe endured for millennia, with women driving a gradual cultural shift toward farming.

Ancient DNA is turning human evolution into a crime scene reconstruction, and one of the prime suspects is a herpesvirus that quietly slipped into our chromosomes and never left. By tracing this viral ...

A glowing, digital double helix represents the billions of base pairs scientists analyze when sequencing ancient DNA. In 1976, workers excavating a tunnel for the Toronto subway system came across ...

New research using ancient DNA has revealed that hunter-gatherer communities in parts of northwestern Europe survived far longer than previously believed — continuing their traditional way of life ...

Long before the Black Death killed millions across Europe in the Middle Ages, an earlier, more elusive version of the plague spread across much of Eurasia. For years, scientists were unsure how the ...

An Ice Age double burial in Italy has yielded a stunning genetic revelation. DNA from a mother and daughter who lived over 12,000 years ago shows that the younger had a rare inherited growth disorder, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Our DNA contains remnants of ancient viruses that embedded themselves into our genetic code. - TanyaJoy/iStockphoto/Getty Images ...