Throughout history, humans have used changes in skin colour to support the idea that people belong to different races, but a new study says it's beyond time to challenge that thinking.

Geneticists have now firmly established that roughly two percent of the DNA of all living non-African people comes from our Neanderthal cousins. It’s difficult to imagine why our early ancestors would mated with them.

Its with great pride that I get to tell this story and I count myself very fortunate to have been a part of this wonderful tale of friendship. In February 2015, a group of fishing buddies (Ron, Cliff & Paul) decided to go fishing in Thailand at a place called Jurassic Mountain Resort & Fishing Park. I was a regular visitor to Jurassic Mountain and happened to be fishing at the same time as the three friends. We all had the same intentions, catching the biggest Carp in the lake, which at the time was a 154lb Siamese Carp.

Posting on social media on 10 September, Emma Kelty joked about a warning she had been given about the stretch of the Amazon river she was about to enter. “So in or near Coari (60 miles) I will have my boat stolen and I will be killed too,” she wrote. “Nice.” Two days later, Kelty, who was canoeing the length of the Amazon, said she was “in the clear”. But hours later she posted again, describing an encounter with armed men...

Two Syrian refugee sisters living in Georgia, USA, cooked an assortment of Middle Eastern dishes to welcome a group of 40 people affected by Hurricane Irma. Abeer and Nora al-Sheikh Bakri, who fled their hometown of Douma in 2012 before resettling in Georgia in 2016, told Huffpost that they know what it’s like to lose everything, and thus felt "compelled" to help.

In July last year, long-haul truck driver Stephanie Klang got a rare speeding ticket because she was too engrossed listening to public radio. “It’s okay, I only get a speeding ticket about once every 10 years,” she said. “… It was worth it for the story.” She told the state patrolman that yes, she knows listening to the radio is not a valid excuse, then proceeded to tell him all about the radio show that took her mind off her speed — an episode of BackStory about the history of taxes in the U.S. after the country had just broken away from England.

It sounds just like the plot line of a television show- a woman naked and afraid, lost in remote woods. But Lisa Theris’ journey back to civilization was real life and a real struggle that lasted a month in Bullock County. “I’m just so happy to be home and recuperating. I just thank everybody for the prayers and support. It means a lot,” she said in an interview at her home in Barbour County. “Just being out of those woods is just the most amazing thing.”

Her shaved head bulged from her skull in a manner so staggering it conjured ludicrous cartoon references in my mind—Toad from Mario Kart, the newscaster from Futurama. Her swollen scalp was riddled with holes of various sizes, the smallest and largest equivalent to opposing sides of a flathead thumbtack. When I first saw her, I was so flabbergasted that my initial reaction was (of all things) to count the lesions. I reached 50 before the nun and registered nurse, Sister C, snapped me out of my daze and prompted me to get to work.

Katy Stubblefield, born and raised in Oklahoma, thinks of herself as a blue dot in a red state and is escaping up north to Canada with her husband, three boys and two cats. As a liberal family, they feel out of place in the conservative state, she told CBC's guest host of On The Coast Gloria Macarenko. "There is a lot of stuff that is scary," she said. "People take their guns to the grocery store around here."

Los Angeles — Samuel Talavera Jr. did everything his bosses asked. Most days, the trucker would drive more than 16 hours straight hauling LG dishwashers and Kumho tires to warehouses around Los Angeles, on their way to retail stores nationwide. He rarely went home to his family. At night, he crawled into the back of his cab and slept in the company parking lot.

Former monk Justo Gallego Martinez has been constructing his own cathedral in Mejorada del Campo, Spain, since 1961. He had no prior knowledge of architecture and hadn't laid a brick in his life, yet his project currently stands 131ft tall, and acts as a wonderful reminder that faith overcomes everything.

The boy was only two days old when his mother slipped out of the hospital. Hours later, he shuddered and convulsed, his body going into withdrawal from the opioids he had grown used to in her womb.

It was his first hot shower in more than a decade. Rob Marriner said he stood underneath the water for one hour, until it ran cold. Then he went to sleep for nine hours - the longest he has been able to sleep in years. Marriner had been homeless since 1984. For 33 years he roamed the streets of West Auckland.

A pair of senior citizens have a relationship that shocks both their families in this potty-mouthed, but endearing, comedy. Starring and directed by Danny DeVito.

Ancient bone and teeth ornaments found in an Indonesian cave advance our knowledge of the culture and traditions of some of the earliest people in our region.

A few days before Christmas 2016, a phone call took place that no one could have predicted. One of the world’s most esteemed HIV doctors, Professor Sheena McCormack – whose life’s work as an epidemiologist has been to track and fight the virus – picked up the phone to deliver a message that would make headline news: In the space of 12 months, the number of gay men in London being diagnosed with HIV had dropped by 40%. Across England it was down by a third.

A couple of years ago, I spent the summer in Portland, Oregon, losing things. I normally live on the East Coast, but that year, unable to face another sweltering August, I decided to temporarily decamp to the West. This turned out to be strangely easy. I’d lived in Portland for a while after college, and some acquaintances there needed a house sitter. Another friend was away for the summer and happy to loan me her pickup truck. Someone on Craigslist sold me a bike for next to nothing. In very short order, and with very little effort, everything fell into place.

A Tennessee man who served 31 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit is petitioning the state to compensate him $1 million for the years of his life that were taken away. All he's gotten so far is $75. In October 1977 a Memphis woman was raped in her home by two intruders. She later identified one of them as her neighbor, Lawrence McKinney, who was 22 at the time. He was convicted on rape and burglary charges in 1978 and sentenced to 115 years in jail. DNA evidence cleared him of the charges in 2008, and when he was released in 2009, the Tennessee Department of Corrections gave him a $75 check to restart his life.

They have put it off all spring and summer, but now it’s autumn and they’re out of excuses, so they set out on what should be the most ordinary of chores: to dismantle a trampoline in one back yard and rebuild it in another. “I love you,” the 4-year-old boy says as they drive through their neighborhood, just after his mother, who awoke with another migraine, told him to “shut up and sit on your butt or else.” “I love you,” he says again, a few seconds later, for what seems like the 10th time today, and now no one says anything. His grandmother stares ahead, dreading where they’re going.

Robert J. Cipriani arrived in Sydney feeling the way he always did on the eve of a gambling trip: giddy, confident, a hustler with pure intentions. It was August, 2011. Under the pseudonym of Robin Hood 702, Cipriani billed himself as an unorthodox philanthropist: the high stakes blackjack player who used his winnings to benefit those in need. It was an act inspired by his own hardscrabble past in blue-collar Philadelphia, and conceived during regular sojourns to Las Vegas (702 is the city's area code).