There’s a set of researchers in the scientific community who feel like the past 10,000 years of human existence didn’t really see a whole lot of movement in terms of noticeable, genetic-level evolution. We advanced enough to create complex agricultural systems, a wide range of advanced technologies, and to build massive, sprawling cities. But in terms of our actual, physical evolution, we hadn’t really made much progress.
A study recently published in Nature argues otherwise.
By analyzing DNA from 15,836 ancient human remains, researchers identified 479 genetic variants that appear to have been shaped by natural selection over the past 10,000 years. That’s evolution happening at the same time as human civilizations rose, and we did all sorts of incredible things like invent bread… which, incidentally, may actually be a part of the problem.
Humans Are Still Evolving. Here’s What Natural Selection Is Changing Now.
Today, it’s estimated that around 80 million people around the world have celiac disease, where the immune system attacks gluten, hurting the intestines. It’s why gluten-free products have proliferated in recent years. For reasons we may never fully understand, people with that mutation had more descendants than people without it, leading to the tens of millions around the world who can’t eat a delicious piece of bread without feeling like their body is attacking itself.
All of this is to say that nature, our surroundings, our environment, is still shaping our genetic evolution, even if that evolution is ensuring that a croissant makes us feel bloated.
There are countless other changes. Genetic variants associated with smoking behavior have declined in Europe for thousands of years, long before tobacco even existed in Europe. Evolution didn’t stop once we started building civilizations across the planet. It just adapted to its new environment. The shift to an agricultural society played a big role in math, helping to reshape diets and expose populations to new diseases that killed many while eventually helping us develop immunity. In fact, traits that once helped early human hunter-gatherers, such as efficient fat storage, likely became liabilities as carbohydrate-heavy farming societies arose.
We often take drinking milk for granted, assuming that it’s just a natural part of life that, of course, our bodies would be naturally equipped to do. That wasn’t the case, as the team found evidence of a genetic variant that developed to help us digest milk as adults.
The point is, the research suggests that humans didn’t stop evolving; we just started evolving in new directions in direct response to the new and rapidly changing environments we were building for ourselves. We were evolving the societies we lived in, and all the while evolution and natural selection were lying in wait, figuring out how to evolve alongside us.
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