Posted on 12/30/2011 12:06:29 PM PST by decimon
Here, Prof Clive Finlayson looks back at the year's developments in human evolution research and asks whether recent discoveries rule out a well known idea about our ancestors.
Hobbits on Flores, Denisovans in Siberia, Neanderthals across Eurasia and our very own ancestors.
Given this array of human diversity in the Late Pleistocene, we might well be forgiven for thinking that Ernst Mayr's contention that "in spite of much geographical variation, never more than one species of man existed on Earth at any one time" had finally been put to bed.
It now seems that a high degree of diversity was also present in the Middle Pleistocene, revealed in the latest analysis of human teeth from that period.
Mayr, one of the great evolutionary biologists of modern times, proposed his single species idea in a Cold Spring Harbor Symposium, published in 1950.
The idea of a single species of human has received a great deal of criticism since Mayr's day but it has also had its vociferous advocates.
So, can we really conclude that the concept was fundamentally flawed on the basis of all the new - fossil and genetic - evidence? That depends on how we understand and define species.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
It does appear, though, that the neanderthalish traits are getting scarcer. It seems to me the human genome is shrinking and people all over the world are becoming more similar to each other. My theory is that technology and globalization has caused the distinct cultures around the world to coalesce their concept of an “ideal” appearance. Fashion trends and “beauty” are becoming unified concepts that don’t vary so much from one place to the next. I think this has an effect on the way humans breed and ends up being similar effect as if someone was actually selectively breeding them against their will.
It's already been done. Today they are called the Irish.
Yup...I believe something like that is going on too.
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