ongoing human evolution
Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2024
New resolution is emerging of some events in ancient human populations, and a clearer view of some parts of the genome.
Top 10 discoveries about ancient people from DNA in 2023
This year's highlights include ways of finding ancient relatives, how some phenotypes evolved in ancient people, and trace evidence from artifacts.
Why are humans evolving to lack their wisdom teeth?
The frequency of M3 agenesis varies greatly among human populations. It may have to do with agricultural diets, but anthropologists aren't sure.
Recent adaptive evolution to resist the toxic effects of arsenic
Examining a study by Carina Schlebusch and coworkers into the peoples of northern Argentina.
David Attenborough says humans have stopped evolving. He's wrong
The famous documentarian has some strong views about the potential of our species, but he overlooks the diversity of environments we have created.
How much of human evolution was due to polygenic adaptation?
This has been an eventful week for those of us who study the dynamics of recent selection in humans. The most significant event was the publication of a paper describing genetic analysis of a long selection experiment in Drosophila. Although the experiment differs from most natural instances of selection in
Notes on Ashley Montagu, recent human evolution, and human equality
The anthropologist argued that humans have stopped evolving, but that isn't the way we understand human evolution today.
Human evolution stopping? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I look into arguments by the geneticist Steve Jones that human evolution has stopped. It hasn't.
Our new paper on why human evolution accelerated
I run through our 2007 work on evidence for recent natural selection across the human genome.
