The Grim Reaper can cut life short and, under the right circumstances, whittle those still standing down to the size of pygmies. That’s the controversial conclusion of a new study, published in the ...

Why the Pygmies of West Africa have such short stature, while neighboring groups don't, has been somewhat of a mystery. Now new research suggests unique changes in the Pygmy's genome have both led to ...

If you liked this story, share it with other people. Around 60,000 years ago the ancestors of modern African Pygmies, known worldwide for their small-stature, separated from local farmer populations, ...

Some 50 Pygmies of the Baka clan lead me single file through a steaming rain forest in Cameroon. Scrambling across tree trunks over streams, we hack through heavy undergrowth with machetes and cut ...

While the stature of pygmies is well-suited to tropical rainforests, the mechanisms underlying their growth remain poorly understood. In order to decipher these mechanisms, a team of scientists ...

In the rainforests of Africa, being small is so helpful that it evolved twice in separate groups. Luis Barreiro of the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada, and his colleagues identified 16 ...

A fossil skeleton found in a cave on Flores Island, Indonesia, in 2004 turned out to be a previously unknown, very small species of human. Nicknamed the “hobbit” (officially Homo floresiensis), it ...