We had always believed that evolution had been arrested for thousands of years. The redheads were telling us the opposite

Evolution has been one of the great allies that has made us get to where we are right now, but there is also an idea that haunts the minds of some people when they point out that comforts, agriculture or the best technologies have made this natural selection stagnates in humans. But… Is this true?

A myth. The answer is no. And to demonstrate it, a group of researchers has recently published a new article in the magazine Nature, breaking this myth, pointing out that evolution has not only stopped, but that the invention of agriculture made it step on the accelerator.

Here the research team has achieved what until recently seemed impossible, namely tracing the footprint of natural selection over the millennia.

How it has been done. It’s not easy to look back into such a long past, but here researchers have used a new method baptized as AGESwhere they have ‘only’ had to process 16,000 ancient genomes from Western Eurasia. In this way, the results have shown that there are 479 genetic variants that have experienced great selective pressure, which is why our biological adaptation has accelerated following the advances that have made humanity as it is now.

Some examples. That there have been changes in our genetics is phenomenal, but sometimes we want clear examples of why this is the case. One of these points out that when the populations of Eurasia abandoned nomadism to settle, cultivate the land and domesticate animals, their diets, exposure to sunlight and social dynamics changed radically.

This translated, for example, into an increase in genetic variants associated with light skin or red hair, the latter being something linked to mutations in the MC1R gene. And its meaning lies in the need to adapt the body to absorb enough vitamin D in climates with little sunlight, although it is also suggested that these genes could share different very relevant adaptation functions.

And also aesthetic. Far from how functional it may be to have a greater absorption of vitamin D, the studies also provide curious data about our evolutionary aesthetics by pointing out that natural selection favored the reduction of baldness in these populations.

Here the discussion is served, since it can be thought that it is related to sexual selection or even that it is the consequence of other changes in genetics that opened the door to fewer cases of baldness and also rheumatoid arthritis.

Images | Johannes Plenio Gabriel Silverio

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