One day, a few years ago, I was rushing from the pool dripping wet when a man with a Russian accent stopped me and said, “You must come to svim with the team.” I was in my early 50s — too old for swim team, I thought. But the coach — Igor was his name — persisted: “I see you are good svimmer.”

New research outlines how the ancestors of modern humans interbred with several archaic human groups on the passage from Africa to Australia.

Sam Khalaf and his son Riyadh used to call themselves the two musketeers. When Riyadh was growing up in Bray, south of Dublin, they were inseparable. Like twins or best friends, they say. So the Iraqi-born, Irish citizen remembers keenly the moment when he realised his eldest child had drifted from him.

The long read: At the age of 20, Christopher Knight parked his car on a remote trail in Maine and walked away with only the most basic supplies. He had no plan. His chief motivation was to avoid contact with people. This is his story.

Stories are what kept Linda Garcia, 51, going as she fought what would have been North America’s largest oil-by-rail terminal from coming to her neighborhood of Fruit Valley in Vancouver, Washington. Garcia traveled sometimes directly from chemotherapy sessions to community meetings, where she never missed the chance to testify against the Tesoro Savage project. All the while, she’d remember the families with young children who told her they didn’t want to be pushed out, or the couple well into their 90s who had been living in Fruit Valley since they got married at 19. “How can I not fight for that?” she asked.

The Red Headed Stranger recently told ‘Rolling Stone’ that weed saved his life by helping him kick a booze habit. Willie Nelson is no stranger to weed, and in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, it may have kept him out of an early grave, too. The interview covered several aspects of Nelson’s life, including his celebrity-branded weed company and his ongoing musical pursuits. But the most shocking highlight came when he discussed how cannabis rescued him from his previous life as an alcoholic.

In his small kitchen, Emam Saber, 77, picks up a raw New York Strip steak with a fork and gently lays it in a pan of steaming hot oil. The meat sizzles loudly, the first of 30 steaks he will be cooking that afternoon for a charity event.“I always cook for charity. I don’t charge anything,” said Saber, a former chef who worked at iconic hotels and a French restaurant in San Francisco.

Ancestors of the people who built Stonehenge travelled west across the Mediterranean to get to Britain.

In "The Goodness Paradox," a Harvard anthropologist explains how we evolved to become less violent while retaining our capacity for warlike behavior.

Laura Delano recognized that she was “excellent at everything, but it didn’t mean anything,” her doctor wrote. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. Her father is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her mother was introduced to society at a débutante ball at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Just when all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I nearly lost my mind and then my life. I’ve never told this story publicly, but now it’s time. It was the beginning of 2011. I had just finished filming the first season of “Game of Thrones,” a new HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels. With almost no professional experience behind me, I’d been given the role of Daenerys Targaryen, also known as Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Lady of Dragonstone, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons.

Filmmaker Aaron Kunkel fashions an absorbing true-crime narrative with a danceable beat from the testimonies of exploited pop celebrities, bilked investors, criminal investigators, and not-so-quietly aghast onlookers in “The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story.” Briskly efficient in its construction and execution, the film focuses on the high times and low dealings of the Orlando, Florida-based music impresario and Ponzi scheme swindler, Lou Pearlman, who famously launched the groups *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys.

In 1997 when I was 16, sexual purity and abstinence-only culture was all I had ever known. I was the girl in the oversized jumper dress that hid my figure and my legs. I wore a silver purity ring on my right hand and a hunter green "What Would Jesus Do?" bracelet on my wrist. I didn’t use makeup or tampons. I didn’t kiss, hold hands, or date. I definitely never looked at my naked body if I could avoid it. I stood out in all the wrong ways, but this was my normal. And all of my homeschool friends were just like me.

New research shows that Homo Sapiens is a domesticated form of our species. And that’s the result of the invention of capital punishment. But how could our low aggressiveness evolve from repeated acts of violence?

Neanderthals have a reputation they do not deserve. Hunched over and hairy, these ancient hominins are often depicted as primitive and uncultured, resembling apes more than us.

The morning of our trip I was woken by my phone beeping. Seven people had been shot dead in a public bar in Mexico the night before in the town we were about to travel to, and my friends were texting to make sure I was alive. It got me thinking it might be a good idea to Google: “Is it safe to drive through the middle of Mexico” about eight minutes before my boyfriend, Cam, and I started our two-day road trip through the middle of Mexico.

"We were really very traditional. We didn't want him turning his daily rhythm upside down." Sitting in a cafe by his office at Oslo City Hall, Robert Steen describes how he used to worry about his son staying up late into the night. "In retrospect, I think we should have been more interested in the game world, where he spent so much time," says 56-year-old Robert. "By not doing so, we robbed ourselves of an opportunity that we didn't know we had."

One day, as a small child, John Allen Chau was rooting through his father’s study when he found something curious and alluring: an illustrated edition of Robinson Crusoe, the classic story of a sailor shipwrecked on a deserted island. “After struggling my way to read it with early elementary school English,” he later told a website for outdoors enthusiasts, “I started reading easier kid-friendly books,” like The Sign of the Beaver, “which inspired my brother and I to paint our faces with wild blackberry juice and tramp through our backyard with bows and spears we created from sticks”.

At the Spokane women’s march this year, as women paraded through the eastern Washington city in pussy hats and pink tees, a skinny, bespectacled man marched alongside, clutching a voice amplifier and brandishing a poster of a giant, bloodied fetus. “You are marching for your own personal convenience, your own personal beliefs,” the man bellowed into the amplifier. “But what about the millions of children who have been murdered by abortion since 1973?”

I’m driving down the 101 toward San Francisco International Airport. A gray blanket of fog pours over the hills in the distance, smothering what would be a luminous California sunset. Eleanor is sitting next to me in the passenger seat taking deep breaths. She does not like to fly. I hesitate, then finally ask what’s on her mind, cutting the air between us. “I don’t want to put any pressure on you, but since this is the last time we’ll be hanging out for a while, I feel like we have drifted apart over the last year. Is there something I did wrong?