In another article (from the Archaeology Magazine) about a conversation between the reporter, Zach Zorich and John Hawks (assistant professor from the University of Wisconsin), I found some interesting facts about human evolution. Apparently, the evolution of humans has not stopped, on the other hand it has been speeding up for...let me see...the past 50,000 years! If your teacher told you that humans had stopped evolving...well...sorry but they were wrong. In those 50,000 years, the human body, brain and teeth have become smaller. Not to mention other things as well. Actually when they counted all the mutations in those 50,000 years they found that there were about 3,000! Amazing.It was also interesting to find out that our language gene (FOXP2) could be a relatively recent gene. This gene could have started in ancient Neanderthals and was then passed on to the modern human. If that is so, evolution has won again!! But this is only a prediction, the FOXP2 gene could also have been developed in modern humans and passed on the Neanderthals, or maybe we are all wrong and FOXP2 is a very old gene.
This study helps us grasp a problem that has been laid out before scientists--what actually explains race. When explaining race by talking about environments experienced in the past, makes more sense than explaining race using 19th century ideas (racial relationships) which don't make much sense from the evolutionary point of view. The idea that there are genetic differences because of environments experienced in the past and demographic growth makes the most sense.
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