Neandertals are shaking off their notoriety for being head bangers. Our nearby transformative cousins experienced a lot of head wounds, yet no more so than late Stone Age people, an investigation proposes. Rates of cracks and other bone harm in a huge example of Neandertal and old Homo sapiens skulls generally coordinate rates recently revealed for human foragers and agriculturists who have lived inside the previous 10,000 years, closes a group driven by paleoanthropologist Katerina Harvati of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

How did life begin? Two common answers come to mind. One is that, at some point, a deity decided to suspend the laws of physics and will a slew of slimy creatures into being. A second is that a one-in-a-trillion collision of just the right atoms billions of years ago happened to produce a molecular blob with the unprecedented capacity to reproduce itself.

When do you need a broadsword, and when would you be better off with a dagger? That’s the question that faced artiodactyls, the group of mammals that includes deer, antelope, goats, giraffes, pigs, buffalo and cows, during their evolution. Many male artiodactyls fight over females using weaponized body parts such as horns and antlers. But pigs and several groups of deerlike animals have tusks instead, and a few species have both. Water deer have tusks so pronounced they are nicknamed “vampire deer.”

Is it time to put the stereotype of the violent and brutish Neanderthal to rest? New research paints a different picture of the ancient hominin — one that looks similar to Homo sapiens. Researchers previously thought that Neanderthal lives were far more nasty, brutish and short than ancient H. sapiens, based mainly on studies looking at levels of injury among both groups. Now, however, in a much more comprehensive look, a team of University of Tübingen (UIT) researchers found that both Neanderthals and H. sapiens living in the Ice Age sustained similar levels of head trauma.

For a group of paleontologists, a tour of the Creation Museum seemed like a great tongue-in-cheek way to cap off a serious conference. But while there were a few laughs and some clowning for the camera, most left more offended than amused by the frightening way in which evolution -- and their life's work -- was attacked.

With his new book, The Creative Spark, Agustín Fuentes, a primatologist and anthropologist currently at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, boldly puts forth the idea that what makes humans special is creativity. The ability of humans to switch back and forth between considering what is, and dreaming of what might be, and to then put these thoughts into actions (often collaboratively), has brought us a very long way from our primate origins to the tool-wielding, world-shaping force of nature of today.

The oldest elephants wandering Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park bear the indelible markings of the civil war that gripped the country for 15 years: Many are tuskless. They’re the lone survivors of a conflict that killed about 90 percent of these beleaguered animals, slaughtered for ivory to finance weapons and for meat to feed the fighters.

The oldest flying squirrel fossil ever found has unearthed new insight on the origin and evolution of these airborne animals. Writing in the open-access journal eLife, researchers from the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont (ICP) in Barcelona, Spain, described the 11.6-million-year-old fossil, which was discovered in Can Mata landfill, approximately 40 kilometers outside the city.

Considered by many to be the least fish-like of fishes, swamp eels are a real oddity and rarely documented. Now Museum scientists have described an entirely new species. The fish was discovered not in water but in damp soil. Museum researcher Dr Rachunliu G Kamei uncovered it while searching the rainforest for an entirely different group of animal, the legless amphibians called caecilians.

Our big toe was one of the last parts of the foot to become human-like, as our early ancestors evolved to walk on two legs.

Salamanders in the European Alps and elsewhere can put off developing into adults for years—or their entire lives—in certain circumstances. By Elizabeth Anne Brown.

New research suggests that soft-bodied organisms called Ediacarans may have been related to an animal of the Cambrian era

It may have been a lazy, 'why bother?' attitude that led to the downfall of an early species of human, according to new research. Findings from the Australian National University after an archaeological excavation in Saudi Arabia found Homo erectus tended to do the bare minimum to get by, while other species of human were inclined to put in the effort. They used "least-effort strategies" for tool making and collection of resources, as opposed to Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, who would climb mountains and haul materials over dozens of kilometres to ensure they had quality goods, the research showed.

Why do these plants do this? By Cynthia Wood.

In an article just appeared in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface. Lancet and colleagues report an extensive literature survey, showing that lipids can exert enzyme-like catalysis, similar to ribozymes.

The fossil of a baby snake has been discovered entombed inside amber. The creature has been frozen in time for 99 million years. The snake lived in what is now Myanmar, during the age of the dinosaurs. Scientists say the snake fossil is "unbelievably rare". "This is the very first baby snake fossil that we have ever found," Prof Michael Caldwell of the University of Alberta in Canada told BBC News.

Keeping everything outside the body seems like a strange choice.

The t-shirt representation of human evolution as a sequence of hunched primates standing tall is a popular cliché.

Humans are evolving more quickly than at any time in history, researchers say. In the past 5,000 years, humans have evolved up to 100 times more quickly than any time since the split with the ancestors of modern chimpanzees 6m years ago, a team from the University of Wisconsin found. The study also suggests that human races in different parts of the world are becoming more genetically distinct, although this is likely to reverse in future as populations become more mixed.

A lot of the powers found in the comics exist in real life. They’re just a bit different.