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Humans are the only mammals with long hair on their heads. Scientists look into what drives this unique feature. Humans evolved long hair on their head to prevent overheating and excess water loss when walking under the hot sun in Africa. iStock, Delmaine Donson In 2004, a Chinese woman named Xie Qiuping won the Guinness World Record for the longest human scalp hair at 5.627 meters—the length of an adult male giraffe! While this is an anomaly, humans are the only mammals that have negligible body hair, but extremely long hair on their heads. “It's such an important part of...

Acting as super-predators, humans are forcing changes to body size and reproductive abilities in some species 300 percent faster than would occur naturally, a new study finds. Hunting and fishing by individual sportsmen as well as large-scale commercial fishing are also outpacing other human influences, such as pollution, in effects on the animal kingdom.

A study suggests that rocky landscapes in East and South Africa could have pushed our apelike ancestors toward bipedalism. Being four-legged has its perks. As a quadruped, your center of gravity is lower, there's less wind resistance when you're running, and, best of all, you can use your hind foot to scratch your ear. All of this raises a big question: What were our apelike ancestors thinking when they started walking upright? A prevailing hypothesis is that they were prompted by climate change. As African forests declined due to temperature fluctuations some 2.5 million years ago, the hypothesis goes, our...