Most people learn to count and do basic arithmetic at a young age and don’t give these skills a second thought. But numerosity or numeracy, the ability to think about and use numbers, is more than a basic skill: It is what underlies the human...

Numeracy or numerosity, the ability to think about and use numbers, varies among human cultures and within populations, much like intelligence does. ...

Humans have had relationships with their pets for thousands of years, talking to them, coddling them, and imbuing them with human attributes. But are these animals “thinking,” and do nonhuman animals have the same sorts of feelings that humans have? Most people with pets would...

The release of Determined, a new book by renowned Stanford professor of primate behavior and neuroscience Robert M. Sapolsky, has catapulted him into the middle of an ancient debate: whether humans have free will and agency over their actions. Determined isn’t just a bio-philosophical...

Ancient human retrovirus DNA could be one of the markers of susceptibility to mental illness—specifically schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder, a new study suggests. ...

The fossil record of our ape ancestors in Africa is almost nonexistent for a period of about 8 or 9 million years. This long gap lasted from about 16.5 million to 7 to 9 million years ago, during the Miocene geological epoch. ...

Millions of years ago, in the Miocene Epoch (23 to 5.3 million years ago), about 100 species of apes roamed Europe, Asia, and Africa. Just a few million years later, this number had drastically declined, presenting fascinating questions for today’s paleoanthropologists. ...

It’s surprising that human infants as young as 10 months may be able to identify social rank. Research suggests that infants learn to distinguish who around them is dominant, using relative body size as a cue. ...

Do living beings learn and pass on to future generations some behaviors or predispositions more easily than others––and if so, how? So-called prepared learning is a question psychologists and other scientists have studied for decades, developing a series of new hypotheses about learning and experiments...

The science of rhythm across species is a new and growing research field, as yet without agreement on the question of whether the phenomenon of rhythm exists for every species. There is, however, fascinating and suggestive experimental and observational evidence: Parrots can bob their heads...