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While I find it impossible highly unlikely that humans will still exist in 50 million years, it’s horrifying fun to see what some scientists artists think we will look like at the end of eternity.
According to these illustrations by madman speculative zoologist Dougal Dixon, humans will evolve into some sort of organ shaped being, with yucky cute trunk tail and our own built in bat wings umbrellas.
The illustrations were published in Omni magazine in the early 1980s, and I can’t help but wonder- would Dougal arrive at the same horrifying interesting conclusion if he were asked to draw future humans again today, or would modern scientific discoveries force him to simply leave the page blank?
What did Neanderthals sound like when they spoke? Apparently like Monty Python actor Terry Jones whenever he plays a female role. According to anthropologist Bob Franciscus, Neanderthals had, compared to modern humans, narrow vocal tracts, larger nasal cavities, and deeper chests. This video shows a man trying to simulate what they might have sounded like.
Link -via Boing Boing
Japanese designer Hiroyuki Shiratori developed erasers that are shaped like the gradually evolving form between modern humans and their ancient ancestors. You can evolve as you correct mistakes. Link (Google Translate) via Colossal | Photo: H-Concept
The super powers of the X-Men may still may take awhile in the evolutionary process. However scientists have discovered that due to rapid population growth human evolution may be speeding up.
In a fascinating discovery that counters a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts.
Thanks to stunning advances in sequencing and deciphering DNA in recent years, scientists had begun uncovering, one by one, genes that boost evolutionary fitness. These variants, which emerged after the Stone Age, seemed to help populations better combat infectious organisms, survive frigid temperatures, or otherwise adapt to local conditions.
You may have noticed that the human penis lacks spines protruding from the surface. This is in contrast to many animals, including other primates such as chimpanzees, which use the spines for sexual competition:
It has long been believed that humans evolved smooth penises as a result of adopting a more monogamous reproductive strategy than their early human ancestors. Those ancestors may have used penile spines to remove the sperm of competitors when they mated with females.
Researchers, while studying another topic, stumbled upon one explanation by comparing the human and chimpanzee genomes:
They first systematically identified 510 DNA sequences missing in humans and present in chimps, finding that those sequences were almost exclusively from the non-coding regions of the genome, between genes. They then homed in on two sequences whose absence in humans they thought might be interesting — one from near the androgen receptor (AR) gene and one from near a gene involved in tumour suppression (GADD45G).
Inserting the chimpanzee sequences into mouse embryos revealed that the former sequence produced both the hard penile spines and sensory whiskers present in some animals. The latter sequence acted as a kind of brake on the growth of specific brain regions — with the removal of its function appearing to have paved the way for the evolution of the larger human brain.
Link | Photo by Flickr user lightmatter used under Creative Commons license
Sure, we’ve got opposable thumbs and larger brains, but was the path of human evolution all that it’s cracked up to be? At Smithsonian magazine, Rob Dunn points out ten problems that we face today as a result of the evolution of our species. Here’s one:
4. Unsupported intestines
Once we stood upright, our intestines hung down instead of being cradled by our stomach muscles. In this new position, our innards were not as well supported as they had been in our quadrupedal ancestors. The guts sat atop a hodgepodge of internal parts, including, in men, the cavities in the body wall through which the scrotum and its nerves descend during the first year of life. Every so often, our intestines find their way through these holes—in the way that noodles sneak out of a sieve—forming an inguinal hernia.
Link via reddit | Photo by Flickr user Ryan Somma used under Creative Commons license
Archaeologists working in Ethiopia have discovered grooves in animal bones indicating that they had been subjected to work with stone tools. If this conclusion is accurate, the earliest tool use by hominids dates back to 3.4 million years — almost a million years before previous estimates:
Primordial butchers using sharp stones to fillet a carcass in ancient East Africa made the marks, the researchers said.
“It pushes back tool use almost a million years,” said archaeologist Shannon McPherron at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, who discovered the bones last year at Dikika, Ethiopia, about 300 miles from Addis Ababa.[...]
Until now, the oldest known stone tools dated to about 2.5 million years ago. Those implements, of which thousands were found in East Africa, are thought to be the work of an early human species. The older find announced Wednesday, however, would predate the evolution of the human family, known as the genus Homo, and raises new questions about the role of tools in spurring human evolution. They may have initiated a shift in pre-humans’ diet, which in turn may have aided the development of larger brains.
Link via Discover | Photo: Dikika Research Project/PA
Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that the ability to cook food contributed to human evolution:
“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”
He continues: “The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer.
Wrangham also asserts that cooking strengthened the bonds within early hominid communities and established lasting gender roles.
Link via Choice | Photo: flickr user flowcomm, used under Creative Commons license
Jesse Bering writes in Scientific American that blushing may have evolved in the human race as a means of ameliorating conflict. By reducing the possibility of deception, it encouraged socially constructive behavior among early humans:
Given the possibility of being deceived, it would have been rather foolish of our ancestors to take at face value a person’s verbal or behavioral expressions of remorse. Instead, over tens of thousands of years, uncontrollable blushing would have evolved as a fairly reliable predictor of the actor’s future behavior. In other words, if the behavior or situation at issue made the person feel so uncomfortable that his or her facial veins dilated—a physiological response that for many people is attended by a somewhat unpleasant tingling sensation—the blusher would probably avoid repeating that behavior in the future. Thus, blushing seems to be an appeasement display. Interestingly, this evolutionary hypothesis is aligned with a recent argument advanced by neuroscientist Mark Changizi in his book The Vision Revolution (BenBella, 2009). Among other things, Changizi claims that our species unusually strong color vision evolved so that we could detect subtle hue changes in other peoples’ skin, thereby deducing their emotions.
Image by flickr user SanFranAnnie used under creative commons license.
