Michael Marshall

For the first time, we have a method for extracting proteins from preserved soft tissues like brains – which could be a treasure trove of evolutionary information

It’s natural to associate wild flights of fantasy with children and a more mundane internal world with adult life. The latest research, though, shows that isn't the whole picture

Teeth are good for chewing and biting, but they are also sensitive – and that may have been their original function hundreds of millions of years ago

Clues are emerging about the ghostly clan that settled eastern Asia and left a genetic legacy in people today

We now have full genome sequences for six species of apes, helping us to pin down our last common ancestor – and potentially changing how we think of the earliest hominins

Rather than simply keeping children away from social media, we need a specially designed option for them. This is how it should look.

The origin of complex eukaryotic cells, of the type found in all plants and animals, is shrouded in mystery. Now, strange microbes from wetlands in China are helping us to understand when they first emerged, and what they were like

Malta's first settlers arrived from mainland Europe 1,000 years earlier than thought

Ancient rocks reveal there were several humid spells in Arabia’s past, which might have given early hominins a route out of Africa long before our genus migrated

Cuneiform, the oldest identified writing system, defied deciphering – until 1857. What happened then makes a terrific read, in Joshua Hammer's The Mesopotamian Riddle

It’s incredibly tricky to pin down the origin of the language that led to the words spoken everywhere between Spain and India

Batteries for electric vehicles are notoriously difficult to recycle, but growing demand for the rare metals they contain is leading to innovative new ways of retrieving them from used power cells

Stone tools are considered the first form of technology devised by ancient humans – but they might not have been invented from scratch

Recordings of brain activity in budgerigars reveal sets of brain cells that represent different sounds like keys on a keyboard – a structure never seen before in any bird brain

Bone fragments from a cave in northern Spain suggest there were multiple hominin species living in western Europe around a million years ago