Why Does Caffeine Exist?
Today, billions of people around the world start their day with caffeine. But how and why did the ability to produce this molecule independently evolve in multiple, distantly-related lineages of…
The Arms Race That Made Insects Take Flight
Spiders and their ancestors have been driving an arms race that began before either stepped foot onto land and resulted in the first powered flight on Earth.
Why We Only Have Ten Toes
Today, all mammals from humans to bats have five fingers or fewer. Yes, even whales, whose finger bones are hidden in their fins. Birds have four or fewer and amphibians…
How We Domesticated Cats (Twice)
A 9,500-year-old burial in Cyprus represents some of the oldest known evidence of human/cat companionships anywhere in the world. But when did this close relationship between humans and cats start? And…
The Second-to-Last Mammoths Ever
About 5,700 years ago, on a small, isolated island off the coast of Alaska, a herd of woolly mammoths crossed a treeless tundra.
PBS Eons: There’s No Single Cradle of Humankind
It would take decades for paleontologists to realize that maybe there wasn’t just one so-called "cradle of humankind," and realize that maybe they’d been asking the wrong question all along.
PBS Eons: When Did the First Flower Bloom?
During the Cretaceous Period, dinosaurs were more diverse, more fierce, and more strange than ever. But something else was happening under the feet of the terrible lizards: for the first…
The Hazy Evolution of Cannabis
How did such a strange plant like cannabis come to be in the first place? When and where did we first domesticate it? And why oh why does it get…
When Did We Stop Being Naked?
Of course, the ancient Egyptians were probably not the first people to ever wear clothing, but we haven’t found any clothes older than the Tarkhan Dress. So how can we…
How Plants Became Carnivores
How and why does botanical carnivory keep evolving? It turns out that when any of the basic things that most plants need aren’t there, some plants can adapt in unexpected…