Rapid evolution: Can mutations explain historical events? (John Hawks at CASW 2009)

We usually think of evolution occurring over millions of years. But modern humans changed their environment 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture and the decline of nomadic life. And theyve been evolving very rapidly ever since. Genes for lighter skin, for example, are new and increasing in Europeans and Asians. Genes related to hearing are evolving very rapidly as well, possibly demonstrating that humans are adapting to language—or to the different sounds needed in particular languages. Genes that increase a populations fitness could lead to greater population growth, spread, and clashes with neighbors—as when populations north of Italy swept into territory once part of the Roman Empire. John Hawks is also comparing modern human DNA to the Neandertal genome, just now becoming available for study, to find out which mutations distinguish us from these very close relatives.

John Hawks, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of Anthropology - University of Wisconsin, Madison

John Hawks' studies include trying to make sense of genetic fragments from different populations, and anthropological bone and tooth specimens, to show how humans have evolved during the past 30,000 years. And he attempts to integrate that knowledge with data from archeology and the historical record.

http://johnhawks.net/weblog

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Education

Tags:

• bone
• tooth
• genetics
• archeology
• human
• DNA
• Neandertal
• genome
• evolution
• nomad
• evolve
• population growth
• mutations
• John Hawks
• CASW
• NASW
• UT
• Longhorn
• University of Texas at Austin

[MrMonkeybat]

This was very interesting.

[thedeeliciousplum]

What a wonderful talk. Thanks for sharing this.

[TRYCLOPS1]

Interesting stuff about that gene in asia about some part of the hairs in the ears? And yes, a good hypothesis is about adaptation of language... but we really don't know... could've been for hearing if a tiger was near by etc... who knows... And yeah, brains could be shrinking because we don't need to store as much info in our memory. We now store everything in paper or computers for everyone to access. Maybe there is some relation between written language and the size of the brain? my regards

[prsaledja]

@Botie2

if i remember correctly religion appeared about 100.000 years ago..... and in my opinion the brain is shrinking because we don't need them so much i.e. surviving became easy, and with our latest development of medicine even more so... and this thing he explains about energy efficiency is not convincing since we have more food in the last 10.000 years than ever before so there is no evolutionary pressure on energy efficiency concerning the brain...

[Botie2]

Is it me or does it seems the start of religion and growth corollates with the brain starting to shrink allmost perfectly?