Evolution of the human face points to a non-violent past

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

1. Yes.

What a lot of people don't understand is that human evolution is ongoing. And human evolution has probably accelerated in the last 10,000 years.

I've recently read a couple of books on that topic. One is The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending. It covers such topics as the change in our face and jaw as food, or how we ate, changed. It's totally fascinating.

There's a sense out there that human evolution came to a screeching halt around 10,000 years ago, around the time some of our ancestors became farmers and built cities. That's simply not true, even taking in to account not all of our (collective or individual) ancestors did that.

Another fascinating book on human evolution is Who We Are and How We got Here: Ancient DNA and the new science of the human past by David Reich. For me the most astonishing part of that book, and what has stayed with me since I read it, is that he says if you go back 10,000 years or more in time, you'll find human groups that are as distinctive as ones we know now (think what we refer to as races) and yet they are completely unrelated to modern groups (again, think races). Human evolution is amazing and fascinating, and is, as I said above, an ongoing thing.