What condition has a humankind not seen? From emergence of Homo Sapiens within the history of primates and beginning to tread the Earth being an early man nearly 5-7 million years ago, it has turned out to become the most intelligent species of Earth.
It is not just humans, even this planet has evolved in order to survive, will it continue to evolve? This, has become a question of our survival especially when it continues to yield the wheels of time and climate change.
And therefore, our ancestors had developed certain traits in order to survive the difficult surroundings they were subjected to. Many of those traits continue to find existence in our bodies while a few have waned off.
Evolution is a greater process that ensures the continuity of races, with a tinge of variation and diversity. Charles Darwin formulated the Theory of Natural Selection in 19th century and it felt like we have understood how the evolution works.
For instance, while the Scientists are still doubting exactly why and how did our ancestors begin walking on two legs but it surely helped them to surf the forest patches for hunting- gathering those were shrinking due to the changing climate.
Our brains got bigger around 200,000 to 300,000 years ago that actually made it possible for us to just not share genes over to the next generation and read books, watch movies and even tell the stories, work with alphabets and numbers etc.
But human race is still evolving; where it may lead, still remains unanswered. With these complications in limelight, the undergoing custom- made evolution has expanded the scope of this revolutionary process even more.
While we may be able to become like Iron Man or Batman driving innovations here and there but developing superpowers in X-men movies, is a bit of a fantasy. Only the human body can decode its mysterious ways.
The recent examples have been a mutation that helps the people residing in city of Pune, India to more efficiently process omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acids.
There is also news of an additional, mysterious artery in the human forearm, known as the median artery, crucial in the supply of blood to a human forearm, hand and fingers during early stages of development.
Primary function of an artery is to carry oxygenated clean blood from heart to various organs.
The median artery is an embryonic structure that gets formed in the mother’s womb and is replaced around the eight-week mark, by another set of arteries called radial and ulnar arteries.
This is an ideal situation where one artery gets replaced by two, but certain humans have evolved to retain all three arteries.
After the analysis of anatomical literature and studies carried on the corpses of 20th-century, a team has detected about 35 percent of people in the world with the presence of median artery, thereby providing an extra supply of blood vessels in human forearms.
Are we Humans evolving faster than ever, with an extra artery?
This rise in prevalence of median artery occurred since the mid-1880s.
“The study demonstrates that humans are evolving at a faster rate than at any point in the past 250 years,” explained a researcher.
Apart from all the benefits it offers to the human body, this presence even has a few cons: compression of the median nerve during adulthood, pain in the forearm and trigger the carpal tunnel syndrome.
While we are walking on the evolutionary path, the human appendix had shrunk over time with changes in human diet, as suggested by the Darwin. A larger appendix was required to process and assimilate difficult plant matter and higher amounts of Cellulose.
Now, a comparatively smaller appendix has spurred the growth of beneficial bacteria to aid our digestive systems.
Another such noticeable yet unheeded indication of greater evolution has been the gradual disappearance of wisdom teeth.
Many of us, must have been worried (me included) while waiting for our wisdom tooth to root out and the consequent removal and pain because of Impaction, infection or crowding.
But some people, around 35 percent, just never tend to develop these third molars throughout their lifetime.
While these wisdom teeth had a purpose for our ancestors, it has grown redundant in the modern world.
Chewing the half-cooked, raw meat- included tough foods would have been difficult without an extra set of molars, that was a necessary part of the mankind’s dietary arsenal. It even used to fit well inside larger jaws of early humans.
It is to note that jaw size in modern humans through a genetic mutation discovered in 2004 called MYH16 has reduced significantly, giving the much-needed space to human brain that needed to grow in size.
Welcome to the club, we are barely evolving!
With greater work at play here, one can understand the impacts of climate change on human evolution but the uncertainty of the process can yield any future we have not even anticipated of.
No such study has indicated if the humanity will evolve for the betterment of planet because its an alchemy of a kind, not even the highest minds have attempted. We can surely trim a few genes to synthesize a better human but what games have the human body designed, remains in dark.
What one can possibly enjoy is the greater moments leading to the path of evolution, where every changed trait a new string to Human Evolution.