Stories by Kate Wong

Nutrition influencers claim we should eat meat-heavy diets like our ancestors did. But our ancestors didn’t actually eat that way

There has never been a better time to be or become a birder

Cats have attained evolutionary perfection

An adorable seabird courtship ritual shows the meaning of love: fish

Extraordinary claims about the small-brained human relative Homo naledi challenge prevailing view of cognitive evolution

How do giant filter-feeding whales find their tiny prey? The answer could be key to saving endangered species

A team of birders races to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours

The Great Eastern Brood has been underground for 17 years. Here’s what the insects have been up to down there

Video produced in partnership with The Great Courses. All Great Courses video content is available only to subscribers with the password sent via email.

A rich archive of data has illuminated the secret lives of birds

Researchers extracted DNA from fossils that are more than a million years old, illuminating the origins of the woolly mammoth and the Columbian mammoth

Experiments on clusters of cultured cells hint that a gene variant found only in Homo sapiens profoundly changed brain development in our species, compared with our extinct relatives

Climate change, nuclear arms control, the pandemic and more will be determined by whoever wins the White House and Congress

Darwin would be delighted by the story his successors have revealed

An analysis of 391 skulls shows that birds evolved surprisingly slowly, compared with their dinosaur forerunners

Our extinct cousins had fiber technology. Stop calling them dumb already

Archaeologists have dated figurative rock art from Sulawesi to at least 43,900 years ago

Archaeologists have dated the image to at least 43,900 years ago, but their interpretation has met with doubt

A long-sought fossil could redraw our family tree

A strange chromosome may have provided fodder for the evolution of new traits

Unpublished excerpts from a 2000 interview capture one of the most controversial figures in modern science

Searching for reality in unreal times

The second tiny ancestor found in the islands of southeast Asia, Homo luzonensis challenges prevailing views of early human dispersal and adaptability

The fossilized print, found in Gibraltar, is said to date to 28,000 years ago, which might mean it belonged to a Neandertal. But not everyone agrees with that interpretation