Given enough time, our collective day-to-day activities may one day directly influence the course of human evolution. Who knows what sitting on our asses and playing video games all day will do to the human race, considering that, according to new research published in Cell Reports, many thousands of years of farming seem to have changed the form and function of our noses.
The study focuses on the Orang Asli, the indigenous population in Malaysia, and the oldest inhabitants of peninsular Malaysia. Particularly, it focused on three groups who all had different lifestyles. There were the hunter-gatherer Negritos, the foraging Senoi, and the farming Jakun. Researchers found that the way these separate groups lived shaped their culture, but also directly shaped their biology.
Humans have around 800 genes tied to our sense of smell, though those have degraded over time as our vision took greater priority. But that’s not the case for Negrito groups, who have spent several generations navigating through dense rainforests. Genes related to their sense of smell have only heightened.
Humans’ Lifestyles Determine Their Genes
If you call thick forests and jungles your home, then your sense of smell helps you find food, track animals, and avoid various dangers. For instance, the smell of wet soil, that earthy, musky scent, is tied to a specific gene that helps us find water or edible fungi. Other olfactory-related genes help us sniff out fatty, calorie-rich foods.
Farming populations evolved down a different path. Their smell-related genes faded. Instead, the genes that rose to prominence were ones tied to metabolism and insulin regulation. That’s likely because their diets were built around agriculture, which included a lot more carbohydrates and more stable food supplies that resulted in different biological needs and pressures.
The big takeaway here is that evolution isn’t something that happened several thousand years ago and then stopped dead in its tracks. It’s an ongoing process that’s slow and steady, and as such, may not be easily noticeable in the day-to-day, but is apparent when you take a wide-angle view of an animal species or the human race.
Which, again, leads me to the thought I had at the beginning: if our fight for survival sharpened our senses, what is our cushier, less threatening modern lifestyle doing to us? Only time — a lot of time — will tell.
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