A team of researchers are offering a theory that human evolution has unfolded faster in the last 5,000 years than at any other period in human development.
This is interesting stuff! An article on DailyGalaxy.com offers the following:
Quote: A team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks estimated that positive selection just in the past 5,000 years alone -dating back to the Stone Age - has occurred at a rate roughly 100 times higher than any other period of human evolution.
The article goes on to explain that the size of the human population is one factor driving genetic change, because larger populations have more genetic diversity. The article states:
Quote: The human population has grown from a few million people 10,000 years ago to about 200 million people at A.D. 0, to 600 million people in the year 1700, to more than 6.5 billion today. Prior to these times, the population was so small for so long that positive selection occurred at a glacial pace, Hawks says.
The premise of this article seems to imply that our genes are responding to the development of knowledge and the emergence of our increasingly technological society.
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