#humanevolution

#humanevolution

What's Ahead for Human Evolution?There are some people who believe that humans are no longer evolving, since we've developed civilization and science. When we study the mechanisms of natural selection, we learn how the pressure from predators made us fast runners, and those who had better immune systems were more likely to pass their genes on. But now we have protection in communities and vaccines against disease. While environmental pressures favor certain traits and spur evolution, we haven't moved completely away from the effects of natural selection. The pressures we have today are just different.For one thing, we now live longer. This is partly due to natural selection, and partly due to medical science. The very absence of the pressure to reproduce at young age, lest we die first, allows us to delay having children. This gives those who experience puberty and menopause at a later age a better shot at producing children who survive and carry on those traits. Yet since survival plays a smaller role in when and how much we reproduce, sexual selection plays a larger role. What people find attractive in each other and how we meet someone to reproduce with will affect what kinds of children will result. Real Clear Science looks at how human evolution worked in the past, and speculates on how changing conditions will affect the traits that will proliferate in humans of the future. -via Damn Interesting(Image credit: Tkgd2007)#evolution #humanevolution #naturalselection

Meet Homo Bodoensis, a New Species that was the Direct Ancestor of Modern HumansPaleoanthropologists often describe The Middle Pleistocene period as "the muddle in the middle '' because human evolution from this time is poorly understood and heavily debated. To try and uncover this mystery in our origins, researchers have recently named a new human ancestor species, Homo bodoensis.The new name is based on a skull found in Bodo D’ar, Ethiopia. The name is a result of the reassessment of existing fossils from Africa and Eurasia. The said fossils were previously attributed to those of the Homo heidelbergensis or Homo rhodesiensis. Based on new DNA evidence, the former was revealed to be early Neanderthal. The latter, on the other hand, remains poorly defined.Palaeoanthropologist Dr. Mirjana Roksandic hopes that this new name will "stick around for a long time," as new names "will live only if other researchers use it."More about this over at The University of Winnipeg.(Image Credit: Ettore Mazza)#Paleoanthropology #HumanEvolution #Evolution

The Extinct Human Species That May Replace Neanderthals As Our Closest RelativesA large fossil skull, now dated to around 146,000 years ago, was found in 1933 near Harbin, China. I had features that were different from any known homo species. Now a team of scientists from China, Australia, and Britain have concluded that it belonged to a new species dubbed Homo longi, which is taxonomically closer to Homo sapiens than Neanderthals are.  The Harbin team generated a family tree (“phylogeny”) of human lineages to work out how the species relates to modern humans. This tree is based on morphological data from 95 largely complete fossil specimens of different hominin species living during the Middle Pleistocene, including Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo heidelbergensis and Homo sapiens along with their known ages. The tree also suggests that five previously unidentified fossils from northeastern China are from Homo longi.The relationships between the species are based on morphology, and may be adjusted when intact DNA is found, if it ever is. The dates assigned to the divergence of species is even less reliable, although the order in which the species diverged should remain as exact dates are adjusted. Read more about this breakthrough at Discover magazine. (Image credit: Ni et al.) #homo #homolongi #humanevolution