Your historical ancestors are unlikely to have done anything remotely interesting. But your prehistorical ones almost certainly did. Like a form of deep genealogy, tracing our origins back thousands and millions of years is a branch of science that never fails to capture the public's imagination.
At Nature, we often find that our most read, downloaded or listened to studies are those about our more ancient relatives, whether it's the hobbit of Flores or the oldest human ancestor, Toumai. Last week, a paper in the journal Cell uncovered the first completed sequence of the Neanderthal genome, and some fascinating insights into our evolutionary cousins. Expect more revelations from this project very soon.
Not much new there.