Attention readers: This blog has moved to a new home at https://chenghlee.wordpress.com/.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

On human evolution

Newsweek has an excellent article summarizing our current understanding of human evolution. It details how genetics and "paleoneurology" are helping us understand when and what changes occurred that made us human. If you're looking for a really short summary of the article and what recent evident suggests, here it is:

[The traditional] model [of human evolution] assumes that each biological innovation, whether bipedality or a large brain or any other, evolved only once and stuck.

Instead, evolution played Mr. Potato Head, putting different combinations of features on ancient hominids then letting them vanish until a later species evolved them.

No comments: