Human Evolutionary Speed

Fascinating work by Anthropologists at the University of Wisconsin on the pace of human evolutionary change:

Countering a common theory that human evolution has slowed to a crawl or even stopped in modern humans, a new study examining data from an international genomics project describes the past 40,000 years as a time of supercharged evolutionary change, driven by exponential population growth and cultural shifts...  The findings may lead to a very broad rethinking of human evolution, [says John Hawks], especially in the view that modern culture has essentially relaxed the need for physical genetic changes in humans to improve survival. Adds Hawks: "We are more different genetically from people living 5,000 years ago than they were different from Neanderthals."

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