Modern Demands Speed Up Human Evolution

The concept of “continuous evolution,” which more and more anthropologists are beginning to rally behind, states that the current stage of our species, Homo sapiens, will not remain the same in the distant future. That is to say, our genes will evolve in such a manner over the next centuries, that a new type of humans will most likely appear. And, contradicting 20th century knowledge, experts now say that our genes are evolving much rapidly on account of the influence that modern life has on us all.

In the 20th century, scientists held that advancements in our technology, such as the appearance of antibiotics, healthier food and other objects that made life easier, would prevent us from coming in contact with mutagen factors, as in events that triggered evolution at a genetic level. But now, experts are not that convinced that this is the case, and, although the debate on whether we have stopped evolving or not still rages on, more and more scientists are rallying behind the second idea.

Anthropologists now believe that human evolution has actually accelerated over the past 10,000 years, and not slowed down as previously thought. They say that one reason why this has happened is the fact that humans have begun to learn how to harvest the land, how to hunt more efficiently, and how to live in large communities.

“For most of the last century, the received wisdom in the social sciences has been that human evolution stopped a long time ago. Clearly, received wisdom is wrong, and human evolution has continued. The pace has been so rapid that humans have changed significantly in body and mind over recorded history,” Henry Harpendin, an anthropology expert at the University of Utah, reveals.

It takes little to influence the variances inside genes, scientists maintain. The gases that have been added into the atmosphere by humans, such as the carbon dioxide, methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFC), as well as the tobacco smoke and the chemicals we eat daily, have all influenced the way in which our genes work.

The UU expert shares that variations are inevitable, because our genome has to get used to this way of living. As a result, future generations may, one day, separate between people similar to those who exist today and some other, new race. Researchers tell that breeding between the two types of humans may become impossible.

“Our evolution has recently accelerated by around 100-fold,” University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) Anthropologist John Hawks adds. He is but one of the many researchers who advocate that there are currently several hundred genes, maybe even more than a thousand, inside the human body, which are evolving and have been evolving since our beginning as a race. “Human evolution didn't stop when anatomically modern humans appeared or when they expanded out of Africa. It never stopped,” Harpending concludes, PhysOrg reports.