research on human evolution

Human Evolution

Six million years of human evolution.

Human evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years.

Paleoanthropology is the scientific study of human evolution which investigates the origin of the universal and defining traits of our species. The field involves an understanding of the similarities and differences between humans and other species in their genes, body form, physiology, and behavior. Paleoanthropologists search for the roots of human physical traits and behavior. They seek to discover how evolution has shaped the potentials, tendencies, and limitations of all people.

What Can Human Fossils Tell Us?

Early human fossils and archeological remains offer the most important clues about this ancient past. These remains include bones, tools and any other evidence (such as footprints, evidence of hearths , or butchery marks on animal bones) left by earlier people. Usually, the remains were buried and preserved naturally. They are then found either on the surface (exposed by rain, rivers, and wind erosion) or by digging in the ground. By studying fossilized bones, scientists learn about the physical appearance of earlier humans and how it changed. Bone size, shape, and markings left by muscles tell us how those predecessors moved around, held tools, and how the size of their brains changed over a long time.

Archeological evidence refers to the things earlier people made and the places where scientists find them. By studying this type of evidence, archeologists can understand how early humans made and used  tools and lived in their environments.

Humans and Our Evolutionary Relatives

Humans are primates . Physical and genetic similarities show that the modern human species, Homo sapiens, has a very close relationship to another group of primate species, the apes. Modern humans and the great apes (large apes) of Africa – chimpanzees (including bonobos, or so-called “pygmy chimpanzees”) and gorillas – share a common ancestor that lived between 8 and 6 million years ago.

Humans first evolved in Africa, and much of human evolution occurred on that continent. The  fossils of early humans who lived between 6 and 2 million years ago come entirely from Africa. Early humans first migrated out of Africa into Asia probably between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago. They entered Europe somewhat later, between 1.5 million and 1 million years. Species of modern humans populated many parts of the world much later. For instance, people first came to Australia probably within the past 60,000 years and to the Americas within the past 15,000 years or so.

Most scientists currently recognize some 15 to 20 different species of early humans. Scientists do not all agree, however, about how these species are related or which ones simply died out. Many early human species – certainly the majority of them – left no living descendants. Scientists also debate over how to identify and classify particular species of early humans, and about what factors influenced the evolution and extinction of each species.

Human Characteristics

One of the earliest defining human traits, bipedalism – the ability to walk on two legs – evolved over 4 million years ago. Other important human characteristics – such as a large and complex brain, the ability to make and use tools, and the capacity for language  – developed more recently. Many advanced traits -- including complex symbolic expression, art , and elaborate cultural diversity – emerged mainly during the past 100,000 years. The beginnings of agriculture and the rise of the first civilizations occurred within the past 12,000 years.

Smithsonian Research Into Human Evolution

The Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program explores the universal human story at its broadest time scale. Smithsonian anthropologists research many aspects of human evolution around the globe, investigating fundamental questions about our evolutionary past, including the roots of human adaptability.

For example, Paleoanthropologist Dr. Rick Potts – who directs the Human Origins Program – co-directs ongoing research projects in southern and western Kenya and southern and northern China that compare evidence of early human behavior and environments from eastern Africa to eastern Asia. Rick’s work helps us understand the environmental changes that occurred during the times that many of the fundamental characteristics that make us human  - such as making tools and large brains – evolved, and that our ancestors were often able to persist through dramatic climate changes. Rick describes his work in the video Survivors of a Changing Environment .

Dr. Briana Pobiner is a Prehistoric Archaeologist whose research centers on the evolution of human diet (with a focus on meat-eating), but has included topics as diverse as cannibalism in the Cook Islands and chimpanzee carnivory. Her research has helped us understand that at the onset of human carnivory over 2.5 million years ago some of the meat our ancestors ate was scavenged from large carnivores, but by 1.5 million years ago they were getting access to some of the prime, juicy parts of large animal carcasses. She uses techniques similar to modern day forensics for her detective work on early human diets.

Paleoanthropologist Dr. Matt Tocheri conducts research into the evolutionary history and functional morphology of the human and great ape family, the Hominidae. His work on the wrist of Homo floresiensis , the so-called “hobbits” of human evolution discovered in Indonesia, received considerable attention worldwide after it was published in 2007 in the journal Science. He now co-directs research at Liang Bua on the island of Flores in Indonesia, the site where Homo floresiensis was first discovered.

Geologist Dr. Kay Behrensmeyer has been a long-time collaborator with Rick Potts’ human evolution research at the site of Olorgesailie in southern Kenya. Kay’s role with the research there is to help understand the environments of the sites at which evidence for early humans – in the form of stone tools as well as fossils of the early humans themselves – have been found, by looking at the sediments of the geological layers in which the artifacts and fossils have been excavated.

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September 1, 2020

15 min read

How Scientists Discovered the Staggering Complexity of Human Evolution

Darwin would be delighted by the story his successors have revealed

By Kate Wong

Pascal Blanchet

I n 1859, 14 years after the founding of this magazine, Charles Darwin published the most important scientific book ever written. On the Origin of Species revolutionized society's understanding of the natural world. Challenging Victorian dogma, Darwin argued that species were not immutable, each one specially created by God. Rather life on Earth, in all its dazzling variety, had evolved through descent from a common ancestor with modification by means of natural selection. But for all of Darwin's brilliant insights into the origins of ants and armadillos, bats and barnacles, one species is conspicuously neglected in the great book: his own. Of Homo sapiens , Darwin made only a passing mention on the third-to-last page of the tome, noting coyly that "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." That's it. That is all he wrote about the dawning of the single most consequential species on the planet.

It was not because Darwin thought humans were somehow exempt from evolution. Twelve years later he published a book devoted to that very subject, The Descent of Man . In it, he explained that discussing humans in his earlier treatise would have served only to further prejudice readers against his radical idea. Yet even in this later work, he had little to say about human origins per se, instead focusing on making the case from comparative anatomy, embryology and behavior that, like all species, humans had evolved. The problem was that there was hardly any fossil record of humans to provide evidence of earlier stages of human existence. Back then, "the only thing you knew was what you could reason," says paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood of the George Washington University.

To his credit, Darwin made astute observations about our kind and predictions about our ancient past based on the information that was available to him. He argued that all living humans belong to one species and that its "races" all descended from a single ancestral stock. And pointing to the anatomical similarities between humans and African apes, he concluded that chimpanzees and gorillas were the closest living relatives of humans. Given that relationship, he figured, early human ancestors probably lived in Africa.

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Since then, Wood says, "the evidence has come in." In the past century and a half, science has confirmed Darwin's prediction and pieced together a detailed account of our origins. Paleoanthropologists have recovered fossil hominins (the group that comprises H. sapiens and its extinct relatives) spanning the past seven million years. This extraordinary record shows that hominins indeed got their start in Africa, where they evolved from quadrupedal apes into the upright-walking, nimble-fingered, large-brained creatures we are today.

And the archaeological record of hominin creations, which encompasses roughly half that time, charts their cultural evolution—from early experiments with simple stone tools to the invention of symbols, songs and stories—and maps our ancestors' spread across the globe. The fossils and artifacts demonstrate that for most of the period over which our lineage has been evolving, multiple hominin species walked the earth. Studies of modern and ancient DNA have generated startling insights into what happened when they encountered one another.

Neandertals were the first extinct hominin species to be recognized in the fossil record and the first to yield ancient DNA. Credit: Javier Trueba/Science Source

The human saga, we now understand, is far more intricate than scholars of yore envisioned. The tidy tropes of our prehistory have collapsed under the weight of evidence: there is no single missing link that bridges apes and humankind, no drumbeat march of progress toward a predestined goal. Our story is complicated, messy and random. Yet it still can be accommodated under Darwin's theory of evolution and in fact further validates that framework.

This is not to say scientists have it all figured out. Many questions remain. But whereas the origin of humans was once an uncomfortable speculation in Darwin's big idea, it is now among the best-documented examples of evolution's transformative power.

We humans are strange creatures. We walk upright on two legs and possess supersized brains, we invent tools to meet our every need and express ourselves using symbols, and we have conquered every corner of the planet. For centuries scientists have sought to explain how we came to be, our place in the natural world.

This quest was often distorted by racist ideologies. Consider the era leading up to the birth of Darwin's bombshell theory. In the 1830s, while a young Darwin was making his momentous voyage onboard the Beagle , a movement was underway to promote the idea that the various modern human groups around the globe—races—had separate origins. To build the case for polygenism, as the theory is known, scientists such as Samuel Morton in Philadelphia collected skulls from people across the world and measured their sizes and shapes, falsely believing those attributes to be proxies for intelligence. When they ranked the specimens from superior to inferior, Europeans would conveniently come out on top and Africans on the bottom. "There was a desire to provide scientific justification for political and power structures," says anthropological geneticist Jennifer Raff of the University of Kansas. "It was science in the service of slavery and colonialism."

Although Darwin's work came down firmly on the side of monogenism—the idea that all humans share a common ancestor—it was nonetheless co-opted to support notions about racial superiority. Social Darwinism, for one, misapplied Darwin's ideas about the struggle for existence in natural selection to human society, providing a pseudoscientific rationalization for social injustice and oppression. Darwin himself did not subscribe to such views. In fact, his opposition to slavery might have been a driving force in his research agenda, according to his biographers Adrian Desmond and James Moore.

By the time Darwin published The Descent of Man , in 1871, the idea that humans had evolved from a common ancestor with apes was already gaining traction in the scientific community thanks to books published in the 1860s by English biologist Thomas Henry Huxley and Scottish geologist Charles Lyell. Still, the fossil evidence to support this claim was scant. The only hominin fossils known to science were a handful of remains a few tens of thousands of years old that had been recovered from sites in Europe. Some were H. sapiens; others would eventually be recognized as a separate but very closely related species, Homo neanderthalensis . The implication was that fossils of more apelike human ancestors were out there somewhere in the world, awaiting discovery. But the suggestion by Darwin, like Huxley before him, that those ancestors would be found in Africa met with resistance from scholars who saw Asia as a more civilized birthplace for humankind and emphasized similarities between humans and Asia's gibbons.

Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that when the first hominin fossil significantly older and more primitive than those from Europe turned up, it came not from Africa but from Asia. In 1891 Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois discovered remains on the Indonesian island of Java that he thought belonged to the long-sought missing link between apes and humans. The find, which he named Pithecanthropus erectus , spurred further efforts to root humankind in Asia. (We now know that Dubois's fossil was between 700,000 and one million years old and belonged to a hominin that was much more humanlike than apelike, Homo erectus .)

Two decades later the search turned to Europe. In 1912 amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson reported that he had found a skull with a humanlike cranium and an apelike jaw in an ancient gravel pit near the site of Piltdown in East Sussex, England. Piltdown Man, as the specimen was nicknamed, was a leading contender for the missing link until it was exposed in 1953 as a fraudulent pairing of a modern human skull with an orangutan's lower jaw.

Piltdown so seduced scholars with the prospect of making Europe the seat of human origins that they all but ignored an actual ancient hominin that turned up in Africa, one even older and more apelike than the one Dubois discovered. In 1925, 43 years after Darwin's death, anatomist Raymond Dart published a paper describing a fossil from Taung, South Africa, with an apelike braincase and humanlike teeth. Dart named that fossil—a youngster's skull now known to be around 2.8 million years old— Australopithecus africanus , "the southern ape from Africa." But it would take nearly 20 years for the scientific establishment to accept Dart's argument that the so-called Taung Child was of immense significance: the fossil linked humans to African apes.

Evidence of humanity's African origins has accumulated ever since. Every hominin trace older than 2.1 million years—and there are now quite a few of them—has come from that continent.

Even as fossil discoveries proved Darwin right about the birthplace of humanity, the pattern of our emergence remained elusive. Darwin himself depicted evolution as a branching process in which ancestral species divide into two or more descendant species. But a long-standing tradition of organizing nature hierarchically—one that dates back to Plato and Aristotle's Great Chain of Being—held sway, giving rise to the notion that our evolution unfolded in linear fashion from simple to complex, primitive to modern. Popular imagery reflected and reinforced this idea, from a caricature in Punch's Almanack for 1882 showing a progression from earthworm to Darwin, to the iconic monkey-to-man illustration that appeared in the 1965 Time-Life book Early Man and became known as the March of Progress.

From the rich assortment of fossils and artifacts recovered from around the world in the past century, however, paleoanthropologists can now reconstruct something of the timing and pattern of human evolution. The finds clearly show that this single-file scheme is no longer tenable. Evolution does not march steadily toward predetermined goals. And many hominin specimens belong not in our direct line of ancestry but on side branches of humankind—evolutionary experiments that ended in extinction.

From the outset, our defining traits evolved not in lockstep but piecemeal. Take our mode of locomotion, for example. H. sapiens is what anthropologists call an obligate biped—our bodies are built for walking on two legs on the ground. We can climb trees if we need to, but we have lost the physical adaptations that other primates have to arboreal life. Fragmentary fossils of the oldest known hominins— Sahelanthropus tchadensis from Chad, Orrorin tugenensis from Kenya and Ardipithecus kadabba from Ethiopia—show that our earliest ancestors emerged by around seven million to 5.5 million years ago. Although they are apelike in many respects, all of them exhibit characteristics associated with walking on two legs instead of four. In Sahelanthropus , for example, the hole in the base of the skull through which the spinal cord passes has a forward position suggestive of an upright posture. A bipedal gait may thus have been one of the very first traits that distinguished hominins from ancestral apes.

Yet our forebears appear to have retained traits needed for arboreal locomotion for millions of years after they first evolved the ability to walk on two legs. Australopithecus afarensis , which lived in eastern Africa from 3.85 million to 2.95 million years ago and is famously represented by the skeleton known as Lucy, discovered in 1974, was a capable biped. But it had long, strong arms and curved fingers—features associated with tree climbing. It would be another million years before modern limb proportions evolved and committed hominins to life on the ground, starting with early H. erectus in Africa (sometimes called Homo ergaster ).

The brain evolved on quite a different schedule. Over the course of human evolution, brain size has more than tripled. A comparison of the braincase of A. afarensis with that of the much older Sahelanthropus , however, shows that hardly any of that growth occurred in the first few million years of human evolution. In fact, most of the expansion took place in the past two million years, perhaps enabled by a feedback loop in which advances in technology—stone tools and the like—gave hominins access to more nutritious foods such as meat, which could fuel a larger and thus more energetically demanding brain, which in turn could dream up even better technology, and so on. Shifts in the shape and structure of the brain accompanied these gains, with more real estate allocated to regions involved in language and long-range planning, among other advanced cognitive functions.

This mosaic pattern of hominin evolution in which different body parts evolved at different rates produced some surprising creatures. For instance, Australopithecus sediba from South Africa, dated to 1.98 million years ago, had a humanlike hand attached to an apelike arm, a big birth canal but a small brain, and an advanced ankle bone connected to a primitive heel bone.

Sometimes evolution even doubled back on itself. When one examines a hominin fossil, it can be difficult to discern whether the species retained a primitive trait such as small brain size from an earlier ancestor or whether it lost the characteristic and then re-evolved it. But the strange case of Homo floresiensis may well be an example of the latter. This member of the human family lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia as recently as 50,000 years ago yet looked in many ways like some of the founding members of our genus who lived more than two million years earlier. Not only did H. floresiensis have a small body, but it also possessed a remarkably tiny brain for Homo , about the size of a chimp's. Scientists' best guess is that this species descended from a brawnier, brainer Homo species that got marooned on Flores and evolved its diminutive size as an adaptation to the limited food resources available on its island home. In so doing, H. floresiensis seems to have reversed what researchers once considered a defining trend of Homo 's evolution: the inexorable expansion of the brain. Yet despite its small brain, H. floresiensis still managed to make stone tools, hunt animals for food and cook over fires.

Adding to the complexity of our story, it is now clear that for most of the time over which humans have been evolving, multiple hominin species walked the earth. Between 3.6 million and 3.3 million years ago, for example, at least four varieties of hominins lived in Africa. Paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie of Arizona State University's Institute of Human Origins and his colleagues have recovered remains of two of them, A. afarensis and Australopithecus deyiremeda , as well as a possible third creature known only from a distinctive fossil foot, in an area called Woranso-Mille in Ethiopia's Afar region. How they managed to share the landscape is a subject of current investigation. "Competing species could co-exist if there were plenty of resources or if they were exploiting different parts of the ecosystem," Haile-Selassie says.

Later, between roughly 2.7 million and 1.2 million years ago, representatives of our genus, Homo —large-brained tool users with dainty jaws and teeth—shared the grasslands of southern and eastern Africa with a radically different branch of humanity. Members of the genus Paranthropus , these hominins had massive teeth and jaws, flaring cheekbones and crests atop their heads that anchored powerful chewing muscles. Here the co-existence is somewhat better understood: whereas Homo seems to have evolved to exploit a wide variety of plants and animals for food, Paranthropus specialized in processing tough, fibrous plant foods.

H. sapiens overlapped with other kinds of humans, too. When our species was evolving in Africa 300,000 years ago, several other kinds of hominins also roamed the planet. Some, such as the stocky Neandertals in Eurasia, were very close relatives. Others, including Homo naledi in South Africa and H. erectus in Indonesia, belonged to lineages that diverged from ours in the deep past. Even as recently as 50,000 years ago, hominin diversity was the rule, with the Neandertals, the mysterious Denisovans from Asia, tiny H. floresiensis and another small hominin— Homo luzonensis from the Philippines—all at large.

Such discoveries make for a much more interesting picture of human evolution than the linear account that has dominated our view of life. But they raise a nagging question: How did H. sapiens end up being the sole surviving twig on what was once a luxuriant evolutionary bush?

Here are the facts of the case. We know from fossils found at the site of Jebel Irhoud in Morocco that our species originated in Africa by at least 315,000 years ago. By around 200,000 years ago it began making forays out of Africa, and by 40,000 years ago it had established itself throughout Eurasia. Some of the places H. sapiens colonized were occupied by other hominin species. Eventually the other folks all disappeared. By around 30,000 to 15,000 years ago, with the end of the Neandertals in Europe and the Denisovans in Asia, H. sapiens was alone in the world.

Researchers have often attributed the success of our species to superior cognition. Although the Neandertals actually had slightly larger brains than ours, the archaeological record seemed to indicate that only H. sapiens crafted specialized tools and used symbols, suggesting a capacity for language. Perhaps, the thinking went, H. sapiens won out by virtue of sharper foresight, better technology, more flexible foraging strategies and bigger social networks for support against hard times. Alternatively, some investigators have proposed, maybe H. sapiens waged war on its rivals, exterminating them directly.

But recent discoveries have challenged these scenarios. Neandertal technology, archaeologists have learned, was far more varied and sophisticated than previously thought. Neandertals, too, made jewelry and art, crafting pendants from shells and animal teeth and painting abstract symbols on cave walls. Moreover, they might not have been our only enlightened kin: a 500,000-year-old engraved shell from Java suggests that H. erectus also possessed symbolic thought. If archaic hominins had many of the same mental faculties as H. sapiens , why did the latter prevail?

The conditions under which H. sapiens got its start might have played a role. Fossil and archaeological data suggest that our species mostly stayed in Africa for the first couple of hundred thousand years of its existence. There, some experts argue, it evolved as a population of interconnected subgroups spread across the continent that split up and reunited again and again over millennia, allowing for periods of evolution in isolation followed by opportunities for interbreeding and cultural exchange. This evolutionary upbringing might have honed H. sapiens into an especially adaptable hominin. But that is not the whole story, as we now know from genetics.

Analyses of DNA have revolutionized the study of human evolution. Comparing the human genome with the genomes of the living great apes has shown conclusively that we are most closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos, sharing nearly 99 percent of their DNA. And large-scale studies of DNA from modern-day human populations across the globe have illuminated the origins of modern human variation, overturning the centuries-old notion that races are biologically discrete groups with separate origins. "There have never been pure populations or races," Raff says. Modern human variation is continuous, and most variation exists within populations rather than between them—the product of our demographic history as a species that originated in Africa with populations that mixed continuously as they migrated around the world.

More recently, studies of ancient DNA have cast new light on the world of early H. sapiens as it was when other hominin species were still running around. In the late 1990s geneticists began recovering small amounts of DNA from Neandertal and early H. sapiens fossils. Eventually they succeeded in getting entire genomes not only from Neandertals and early H. sapiens but also from Denisovans, who are known from just a few fragmentary fossils from Siberia and Tibet. By comparing these ancient genomes with modern ones, researchers have found evidence that our own species interbred with these other species. People today carry DNA from Neandertals and Denisovans as a result of these long-ago encounters. Other studies have found evidence of interbreeding between H. sapiens and unknown extinct hominins from Africa and Asia for whom we have no fossils but whose distinctive DNA persists.

Mating with other human species might have aided H. sapiens' success. Studies of organisms ranging from finches to oak trees have shown that hybridization with local species can help colonizing species flourish in novel environments by giving them useful genes. Although scientists have yet to figure out the functions of most of the genes people today carry from extinct hominins, they have pinpointed a few, and the results are intriguing. For instance, Neandertals gave H. sapiens immunity genes that might have helped our species fend off novel pathogens it encountered in Eurasia, and Denisovans contributed a gene that helped people adapt to high altitudes. H. sapiens may be the last hominin standing, but it got a leg up from its extinct cousins.

Scientists have many more pieces of the human-origins puzzle than they once did, but the puzzle is now vastly bigger than it was previously understood to be. Many gaps remain, and some may never close. Take the question of why we evolved such massive brains. At around 1,400 grams, the modern human brain is considerably larger than expected for a primate of our body size. "The singularity is why it's interesting—and why it's impossible to answer scientifically," Wood observes. Some experts have suggested that hominin brains ballooned as they adapted to climate fluctuations between wet and dry conditions, among other explanations. But the problem with trying to answer "why" questions about the evolution of our unique traits, Wood says, is that there is no way to evaluate the proposed explanations empirically: "There isn't a counterfactual. We can't go back to three million years ago and not change the climate."

Other mysteries may yield to further investigation, however. For example, we do not yet know what the last common ancestor of humans and the Pan genus that includes chimps and bonobos looked like. Genomic and fossil data suggest that the two lineages diverged between eight million and 10 million years ago—up to three million years before the oldest known hominin lived—which means that paleoanthropologists may be missing a substantial chunk of our prehistory. And they have hardly any fossils at all of Pan , which has been evolving along its own path just as long as we have. Insights may come from a project currently underway in central Mozambique, where Susana Carvalho and Ren Bobe of the University of Oxford and their colleagues are hunting for fossil primates, including hominins, in sediments older than the ones that yielded Sahelanthropus, Orrorin and Ardipithecus .

Later stages of the human story are riddled with unknowns, too. If H. sapiens was interbreeding with the other hominin species it encountered, as we now know it was, were these groups also exchanging culture? Might H. sapiens have introduced Neandertals to novel hunting technology and artistic traditions—or vice versa? New techniques for retrieving ancient DNA and proteins from otherwise unidentifiable fossils and even cave sediments are helping researchers determine which hominin species were active and when at key archaeological sites.

One wonders where the next discovery will take us in the quest to understand who we are and where we come from. We may have found our place in nature, located our twig on the shrub, but we are still searching for ourselves. We're only human, after all.

Credit: Moritz Stefaner and Christian Lässer For more context, see “ Visualizing 175 Years of Words in Scientific American ”

Kate Wong is an award-winning science writer and senior editor at Scientific American focused on evolution, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, paleontology and animal behavior. She is fascinated by human origins, which she has covered for more than 25 years. Recently she has become obsessed with birds. Her reporting has taken her to caves in France and Croatia that Neandertals once called home, to the shores of Kenya's Lake Turkana in search of the oldest stone tools in the world, to Madagascar on an expedition to unearth ancient mammals and dinosaurs, to the icy waters of Antarctica, where humpback whales feast on krill, and on a "Big Day" race around the state of Connecticut to find as many bird species as possible in 24 hours. Kate is co-author, with Donald Johanson, of Lucy's Legacy: The Quest for Human Origins . She holds a bachelor of science degree in biological anthropology and zoology from the University of Michigan. Follow Wong on X (formerly Twitter) @katewong

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How scientists perceive the evolutionary origin of human traits: Results of a survey study

Hanna tuomisto.

1 Department of Biology, University of Turku, Turku, Finland

Matleena Tuomisto

Jouni t. tuomisto.

2 National Institute for Health and Welfare, Kuopio, Finland

Associated Data

Data are available from the Dryad Digital Repository: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s9r98

Various hypotheses have been proposed for why the traits distinguishing humans from other primates originally evolved, and any given trait may have been explained both as an adaptation to different environments and as a result of demands from social organization or sexual selection. To find out how popular the different explanations are among scientists, we carried out an online survey among authors of recent scientific papers in journals covering relevant fields of science (paleoanthropology, paleontology, ecology, evolution, human biology). Some of the hypotheses were clearly more popular among the 1,266 respondents than others, but none was universally accepted or rejected. Even the most popular of the hypotheses were assessed “very likely” by <50% of the respondents, but many traits had 1–3 hypotheses that were found at least moderately likely by >70% of the respondents. An ordination of the hypotheses identified two strong gradients. Along one gradient, the hypotheses were sorted by their popularity, measured by the average credibility score given by the respondents. The second gradient separated all hypotheses postulating adaptation to swimming or diving into their own group. The average credibility scores given for different subgroups of the hypotheses were not related to respondent's age or number of publications authored. However, (paleo)anthropologists were more critical of all hypotheses, and much more critical of the water‐related ones, than were respondents representing other fields of expertise. Although most respondents did not find the water‐related hypotheses likely, only a small minority found them unscientific. The most popular hypotheses were based on inherent drivers; that is, they assumed the evolution of a trait to have been triggered by the prior emergence of another human‐specific behavioral or morphological trait, but opinions differed as to which of the traits came first.

1. INTRODUCTION

Human evolution is a topic that interests not just researchers specialized in paleoanthropology, but also other scientists and the general public. A number of conflicting hypotheses have been put forward to explain why humans have become strikingly different from other primates. Most scientists in relevant fields (such as paleoanthropology, paleontology, ecology, evolution and human biology) have never published their views on the drivers of human evolution in general, nor on which of the proposed hypotheses on the origin of specific human traits they find most substantiated. No recent summary of the mainstream view among paleoanthropologists has been published either, so there is uncertainty as to whether scientists agree on the driving forces behind human evolution or not. The idea of carrying out a survey to find out emerged when one of us was teaching a university course on human evolution, happened to check what Wikipedia had to say on the subject, and noticed that some Talk pages (especially the one behind the article “Aquatic ape hypothesis”) contained definite but unreferenced claims about what the opinions of “all scientists” or “all paleoanthropologists” are.

Humans differ from all the other 400 primate species in many respects, some of the most striking ones being that they walk fully upright on their hind legs, have unusually big brains, and have an effectively naked rather than fur‐covered skin (Figure  1 ). Other features that among primates are uniquely human include descended larynx, articulated speech and the capacity to accumulate fat in a thick subcutaneous layer.

Male and female human figures from the plaque of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecrafts. The pictorial message was intended to describe the origin of the probe for potential extraterrestrial life. It shows several typically human traits, such as bipedalism, nakedness, arched nose, large head, and opposable thumbs. Source: NASA ; vectors by Mysid (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons

A number of conflicting hypotheses have been proposed to explain why these and other traits originally evolved in the lineage leading to humans but in none of the lineages leading to other extant primates. One line of argumentation is based on the widely accepted idea that animal species adapt to their environment by natural selection: Traits that give the animal a higher probability of survival and reproduction become more common over time and traits related to lower survival and reproduction rates become less common. Adaptive traits are often morphological (like long legs that increase running speed and facilitate escaping from predators, or thick fur that protects from heat loss in cold weather), but they can also be behavioral (like building a nest or being nocturnal). The corollary of viewing traits of a species as adaptations to its environment is that traits are expected to change if the environment changes, because then also the adaptive pressures change. In particular, if sister species have very different traits in spite of close genetic relatedness, the adaptationist scenario suggests that the lineages experienced different environments during their evolutionary past.

It has indeed been proposed that the ancestors of humans came to live in a different kind of environment than the ancestors of chimpanzees and gorillas, and adapted by evolving a suite of novel traits. One of the early proposals along these lines, suggested already by Lamarck and Darwin, was that human ancestors descended from the trees and moved to the open savanna (Bender, Tobias, & Bender, 2012 ; Dart, 1925 ; Domínguez‐Rodrigo, 2014 ; Leakey & Lewin, 1977 ). Because terrestrial life in the dry savanna is very different from arboreal life in wet forests, this change in habitat would have shifted the prevailing selection pressures: Traits that were adaptive in the old environment could become maladaptive in the new one, and novel morphological traits could be favored if they gave a higher probability of survival and reproduction. The ancestors of the great apes stayed in the forest and, therefore, remained more similar to other primates.

The savanna scenario has lost some of its appeal since paleoenvironmental reconstructions started to show that the environmental setting has been more complex than was originally thought. Accordingly, more recent accounts describe the environment of early human ancestors as a mosaic of woodlands, savanna, and water bodies with considerable temporal fluctuations between climatically arid and wet periods (Bender et al., 2012 ; Domínguez‐Rodrigo, 2014 ; Kingston, 2007 ; Kovarovic & Andrews, 2007 ; Maslin & Christensen, 2007 ). Environmental variability itself has also been proposed to have selected for versatility of adaptations (Potts, 1998a , b ).

There have been different views on which aspects of terrestrial life would have required the morphological changes that the human lineage has experienced, so a large number of different explanations have been put forward for each trait. For example, the origin of the bipedal gait has been attributed to (among other things) gaining better visibility over the savanna grass (Ravey, 1978 ), reaching for food on low branches (Hunt, 1994 , 1996 ), collecting small food items from the ground (Jolly, 1970 ; Kingdon, 2003 ), exposing a smaller part of the body to the scorching sun (Wheeler, 1984 , 1991 ), allowing more energy‐efficient long‐distance travel (Carrier et al., 1984 ; Pontzer, Raichlen, & Sockol, 2009 ; Rodman & McHenry, 1980 ), and freeing the hands to carry food, tools, weapons, or babies (Bartholomew & Birdsell, 1953 ; Hewes, 1961 ; Lovejoy, 1981 ; Sutou, 2012 ; Washburn, 1960 ). It has also been proposed that bipedalism originated already in the trees for hand‐supported walking on small branches too weak for brachiation (Crompton, Sellers, & Thorpe, 2010 ; Thorpe, Holder, & Crompton, 2007 ).

Another adaptationist proposal is that the human ancestors moved from the trees to the waterside, and started to adapt to a partly aquatic way of life (Hardy, 1960 ; Morgan, 1982 ; Verhaegen, Puech, & Munro, 2002 ). This would have exposed them to similar selection pressures than semi‐aquatic mammals, rather than to selection pressures typically experienced by other primates. Under this scenario, bipedal gait would have emerged because it allowed wading to deeper water and made the body more streamlined when swimming and diving for food (Kuliukas, 2002 ; Morgan, 1990 ; Niemitz, 2010 ; Verhaegen et al., 2002 ).

Not all traits need to have originated to enhance survival, however, and critical voices have been raised against interpreting all uniquely human traits as adaptations driven by natural selection (Gee, 2013 ). Sexual selection is known to have produced spectacular new traits in various animals, typically ornaments whose sole purpose is to attract the attention of the opposite sex. These confer no survival advantage or may even be harmful to the bearer. At least human bipedalism, nakedness, and subcutaneous fat layer have been explained by this mechanism (Barber, 1995 ; Giles, 2011 ; Tanner, 1981 ). Especially in small populations, traits may even emerge due to chance fixation of random variation (Sutou, 2012 ).

For someone interested in the “why” of human evolution, it is currently hard to find a comprehensive account of the scientific state of the art. Journal articles typically address only one or a few hypotheses in isolation of the others and often their focus is more on “how” than on “why” a given trait originally emerged (e.g., Crompton et al., 2010 ; Cunnane & Crawford, 2014 ; Isler & Van Schaik, 2014 ; Stout & Chaminade, 2012 ; Watson, Payne, Chamberlain, Jones, & Sellers, 2008 ; Wells, 2006 ). Only proponents of the aquatic/waterside hypotheses (collectively known as the aquatic ape hypothesis or AAH) seem to maintain that it is possible to explain most of the uniquely human traits as adaptive responses to a specific external factor (e.g., Morgan, 1997 ; Vaneechoutte, Kuliukas, & Verhaegen, 2011 ), but these views have found little resonance in paleoanthropological journals (Bender et al., 2012 ). Indeed, AAH has been fiercely opposed and criticized for being an umbrella hypothesis that attempts to explain everything, for being unparsimonious, for lacking evidence and even for being pseudoscience (Hawks, 2005 ; Langdon, 1997 ; Moore, 2012 ).

Here, we aim to find out what scientists really think about why some of the most striking human traits have emerged. We do so by analyzing the results of an online survey where scientists were directly asked for their views on the issue.

2. MATERIALS AND METHODS

2.1. survey.

A survey was performed using an online form in early 2013. Invitation to participate in the survey was sent by email to the authors of articles and review papers that had been published in a scientific journal of a relevant field during the three previous years (2010–2012). A 3‐year period was thought to be long enough for most researchers to have published at least one scientific paper, but short enough for most of the email addresses given in those papers not to have become obsolete. The focus was on journals of paleontology, zoology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and human biology. Only journals with an ISI impact factor equal to or larger than 1.0 were considered. The exact criteria used to select the journals, as well as a full list of journal names, can be found in Appendix S1 .

Almost 58,000 unique email addresses were found in the information available online for the papers published in the selected journals during the selected time period. The full address list exceeded the capacity of the online survey system (Webropol), so the addresses were sorted in alphabetical order, and an invitation to participate in the survey was sent to the first 29,000 addresses. The remaining addresses were used for a different survey, whose results will be reported elsewhere. The first page of the online survey informed participants about the purpose of the survey. The survey was performed anonymously, and all who responded did so voluntarily. After a few reminders had been sent, a total of 1,266 persons had submitted their responses to the survey.

Although the initial sample was large and can be considered representative of the scientific community in relevant fields, the proportion of invitees who answered the survey was very small (4.4%). The sample is no doubt biased toward people who have a larger than average interest in human evolution. Therefore, the obtained answers do not reflect the opinions of the entire scientific community. Nevertheless, they can indicate whether any of the hypotheses proposed to explain the evolutionary origin of a specific human trait is universally accepted or rejected. Even if this were not the case, the survey gives indication of which hypotheses are most or least popular, although conclusions in this respect remain tentative.

The survey first asked background information of the respondent, such as gender, age, the highest academic degree obtained, number of scientific publications authored (both overall and on human evolution), degree of knowledge about human evolution, and whether the respondent has taught courses on human evolution. The second part listed fifteen human traits (such as bipedalism) and asked the respondents to rate the credibility of 51 alternative hypotheses that have been proposed to explain their evolutionary origin (such as freeing the hands for tool use or seeing over tall grass). The credibility scoring was done using a five‐point scale: very unlikely, moderately unlikely, no opinion, moderately likely, and very likely. The number of alternative hypotheses considered was ten for both bipedalism and brain size, eight for hairlessness, seven for speech, four for subcutaneous fat, and three for descended larynx. In addition, there were nine traits for which only one explanation has been proposed in the literature, and this was related to the aquatic ape hypothesis. The third part asked about the respondents’ views on criticism against AAH. All questions and a summary of the answers are presented in Appendix S2 .

2.2. Data analyses

The respondents were asked for their professional field of expertise by offering 15 alternatives. For statistical analyses, these were simplified to four categories to ensure sufficient sample size in each. The group “(paleo)anthropologist” was formed by lumping the originally separate fields “paleoanthropology” and “anthropology or archaeology.” The group “biologist” was formed by lumping all the original subfields of biology (animal physiology, anatomy, or morphology; ecology; evolution; genetics or molecular biology; other) and the group “human biologist” by lumping all subfields of human biology (cardiovascular or respiratory system, musculoskeletal system, nervous system, nutrition, other aspects of human biology). The fourth group was “other,” which contained the remaining fields (geology, paleontology, other).

Overall relationships among the hypotheses were visualized by principal coordinates analysis (PCoA), where the objects were the hypotheses and the descriptors were individual respondents, with the variable of interest being the credibility score each respondent had given to each hypothesis. A Euclidean distance matrix was calculated, such that the distance between two hypotheses reflects how differently the respondents scored their credibilities. Every respondent who gave one of the hypotheses a higher score than the other increased the final distance between the hypotheses, with the overall distance between the hypotheses equaling zero if every respondent had scored both hypotheses similarly (irrespective of whether the score itself was high or low). PCoA visualizes these pairwise distances, so the closer together two hypotheses get plotted in the ordination diagram, the more similar their explanatory value is in the opinion of an average individual respondent.

The respondents themselves were plotted in the PCoA ordination space on the basis of the scores they had given to the hypotheses. Therefore, the relative positions of the respondents reflect their opinions on the hypotheses: Respondents get plotted toward the same part of the ordination space as the hypotheses they gave highest credibility scores, and far away from the hypotheses they gave lowest scores.

Relationships between the respondents’ opinions and their backgrounds were first assessed visually with the help of the ordination diagram. We then used analysis of variance to test whether there were differences in the average opinions of respondents of different backgrounds. If so, a post hoc Tukey's honest significance test was carried out to assess which aspects of the respondents’ background were associated with differences in opinion. A more detailed breakdown of the respondents’ opinions was obtained by visually comparing the distributions of the credibility scores given to the different hypotheses. This was done both to obtain an idea of which hypotheses are most popular overall, and to see if there were differences among respondents representing different scientific fields and/or having different levels of scientific experience.

R statistical software version 3.3.2 ( https://cran.r-project.org/ ) was used both to run the analyses and to produce the graphs. The vegan package (Oksanen et al., 2015 ) was used for principal coordinates analysis. The survey data and all R code used to manipulate and analyze the data are available at Opasnet web‐workspace http://en.opasnet.org/w/Evolutionary_origin_of_human_traits . The survey data are also available from the Dryad Digital Repository https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s9r98 .

Principal coordinates analysis revealed some clear patterns among the hypotheses proposed to explain the evolutionary origin of specific human traits. The most eye‐catching feature of the ordination diagram in Figure  2 a is that the hypotheses got divided into two elongated groups that parallel each other but are clearly separated (the abbreviations of Fig. ​ Fig.2 2 are explained in Table  1 ). The smaller group contains all the hypotheses that evoke adaptation to swimming or diving as an explanatory factor for the emergence of a trait, and the larger group contains all other hypotheses, whether they refer to adaptation to a specific environment or to needs that emerge from a specific behavior. Because all the hypotheses in the smaller group refer to locomotion in water and have been included in the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH), this group will be referred to as the water‐related or AAH group. For lack of a better unifying term, the larger group will be referred to as the dryland group.

Principal coordinates analysis ( PC oA) of different hypotheses proposed to explain the evolutionary origin of specific human traits. Distances between hypotheses are based on scores given by (a) all respondents, or only respondents whose main field of expertise is (b) anthropology or paleoanthropology, (c) biology, (d) human biology, or (e) other. Each colored point corresponds to one hypothesis, and the color indicates which of the traits listed in the inset the hypothesis aims to explain. Points are scaled to reflect the average credibility score given to the corresponding hypothesis by the respondents of the mentioned expertise group. The hypothesis name abbreviations are explained in Table  1 . Each gray point in (a) corresponds to one respondent, whose position within the ordination space reflects the scores given to the hypotheses. For example, respondents plotted toward the bottom left part of the respondent cloud found the hypotheses plotted toward the bottom left of the hypothesis cloud more credible than the hypotheses at the top, and vice versa. More details on the respondent ordination are shown in Figure  3

The hypotheses on the evolutionary origin of human traits that were included in an online survey to find out how popular they are among scientists. The abbreviations are used in the figures, and the full text is copied verbatim from the survey. If ambiguous, the abbreviated hypothesis is followed by a letter depicting the trait: B = bipedalism, E = encephalization (big brain), F = subcutaneous fat, N = nakedness, L = descended larynx, S = speech, O = other

Within each of the two groups, the hypotheses got sorted by their popularity, with the average credibility score increasing toward the bottom left in Figure  2 a. A tight cluster at the extreme left of the dryland group was formed by five hypotheses with high average credibility scores (4.08–4.26 on a 1–5 scale, with 1 corresponding to “very unlikely” and 5 to “very likely”). This cluster included the most popular hypothesis for the subcutaneous fat layer (energy reserve especially for the developing brain), the descended larynx (required by articulate speech), bipedalism (use of tools and weapons), speech (social pressure for elaborate communication), and the big brain (complex social organization).

This combination might be the most popular overall scenario for the origin of these traits, but the next most popular 2–3 explanations for bipedalism (freeing hands for foraging, better view over tall grass), large brain (required by either language or collaborative hunting), and speech (required by either collaborative hunting or transmitting cultural tradition; triggered by the descended larynx) also received high average credibility scores (3.53–3.96). Their proximity in ordination space indicated that they were found credible by the same respondents, which makes it difficult to identify a single most popular overall scenario. The hypotheses explaining hairlessness were not found convincing by the respondents, as even the two most popular ones (avoidance of overheating when hunting, avoidance of ectoparasites) had average credibility scores of only 3.48 and 3.17, respectively.

Eleven of the twelve most popular hypotheses were based on inherent drivers of evolution, that is, proposing that morphological traits emerged in response to selection pressure either from a novel behavior or from a pre‐existing morphological trait. Hypotheses based on selection pressure from a new kind of external environment were less popular even within the dryland group, and the credibility scores of all the hypotheses in the water‐related group were low to intermediate (2.26–2.99). The hypotheses proposing that encephalization was triggered by improved nutrition also received intermediate popularity scores, whether achieved by cooking or by increased consumption of fish or meat (all three with credibility scores in the range 2.61–2.77). The four least popular hypotheses of all (credibility scores 1.95–2.20) were based on inherent drivers operating on dry land.

The ordination results suggest that the respondents viewed the water‐related hypotheses as an ensemble whose overall credibility they assessed independently of how they scored the credibilities of the other hypotheses. This impression is strengthened when viewing the ordination of the respondents (the gray cloud in Figure  2 a) in more detail (Figure  3 ). The main gradient among the respondents follows the average credibility score they gave for the water‐related hypotheses (Figure  2 a), and this is almost perpendicular to the (less clear) gradient of average credibility scores given for the twelve most popular hypotheses (Figure  3 b).

The positions of the survey respondents in the space of the principal coordinates analysis shown in Figure  2 a. The ordination is the same in each panel, but colors illustrate different kinds of information related to each respondent. The colored crosses indicate the mean position of the respondents belonging to the respective subgroup. (a) Average credibility score given to the hypotheses in the water‐related group (the smaller cloud of points in Figure  2 a). (b) Average score given to the 12 most popular hypotheses in Figure  2 a. (c) Number of scientific publications authored or co‐authored (crosses of all three categories overlap). (d) Field of expertise. (e) Familiarity with hypotheses on human evolution. (f) Experience in teaching human evolution

The respondents’ position in the ordination did not seem to be related with how much scientific experience they had in general, as measured with the total number of scientific publications they had authored (Figure  3 c), but it was related with how much they knew about human evolution. Those having more background information on this specific topic (by self‐assessment, by main field of expertise being paleoanthropology or anthropology, or by having taught university courses on the topic) appeared to be more often plotted in the upper part of the ordination than respondents representing other backgrounds (Figure  3 d–f).

The visual impressions were confirmed by statistical analyses. These were carried out separately for five different subgroupings of the hypotheses. Three of these were chosen because they formed clear groups in the ordination of Figure  2 a (the dryland hypotheses, the water‐related hypotheses, the 12 most popular dryland hypotheses). The dryland hypotheses were also split into those based on environmental adaptation and those evoking behavioral drivers.

The largest effect by far on the responses was that of the field or expertise, with (paleo)anthropologists being more critical overall than representatives of any other expertise group (Table  2 ). The difference was especially large for the water‐related hypotheses: The average credibility score given by (paleo)anthropologists to this group of hypotheses (2.10 on the 1–5 scale) was much lower than the average score given by human biologists (3.02), with biologists (2.70), and others (2.67) being intermediate. For the dryland hypotheses, the difference between (paleo)anthropologists (2.97) and human biologists (3.22) was only 0.25 (vs. 0.92 in the case of the water‐related hypotheses), and the differences in the scores given by biologists, human biologists, and others were not statistically significant.

Results of Tukey's HSD test between different subgroups of respondents (line starting with Test result ~) and their average credibility scores (standard deviation in parentheses) for different groups of hypotheses: the most popular 12 hypotheses; the dryland hypotheses (the larger hypothesis group in Figure 2a); the water‐related hypotheses (the smaller hypothesis group in Figure 2a); dryland hypotheses based on behavioural demands; dryland hypotheses based on adaptation to the external environment

The results obtained with respondent subgroups based on total number of authored peer reviewed publications and total number of authored popular science publications are not shown, because they were not associated with significantly different ( p  < .05) means in any comparisons.

*** p  < .001; ** p  < .01; * p  < .05.

Overall scientific experience (as measured with the number of scientific publications authored) had no effect on the scores given to either the dryland or the water‐related hypotheses (Table  2 ). However, the more knowledge the respondents had on human evolution specifically (self‐assessed familiarity with the hypotheses, number of scientific publications on human evolution or experience in teaching human evolution), the lower the scores they gave to the water‐related hypotheses. Among biologists, those who knew more about human evolution were more critical than the less knowledgeable ones, and (paleo)anthropologists were more critical than human biologists with the same self‐assessed knowledge level.

When the dryland hypotheses were split into two groups depending on whether they were based on behavioral arguments or environmental adaptation, both groups obtained rather similar results. The main difference was that the behavioral hypotheses received somewhat higher average credibility scores, which reflects the fact that 10 of the 12 most popular hypotheses were based on behavior (on the other hand, so were the four least popular hypotheses).

To visualize the differences in opinion among the (paleo)anthropologists and representatives of other fields, we repeated the ordination of the hypotheses for each of the four respondent groups separately. In accordance with the fact that most respondents were biologists, the ordination based on the biologists’ data only (Figure  2 c) was very similar to the ordination based on all respondents (Figure  2 a). The ordination based on (paleo)anthropologists’ views (Figure  2 b) differed especially in relation to the hypotheses for bipedalism: Hypotheses that explained bipedalism by foraging, tool use, or carrying were very far removed from the main cloud and toward the opposite side than the water‐related hypotheses. In addition, the average credibility scores given to the water‐related hypotheses were among the lowest of any hypotheses. This contrasted with the situation in the ordination based on human biologists’ data (Figure  2 d), in which the water‐based hypotheses had intermediate credibility scores.

The hypotheses differed clearly from each other in the frequencies of different credibility scores, but there were some similarities in the overall pattern among those six traits for which three or more hypotheses were evaluated (Figure  4 ). None of the hypotheses received the “very likely” score from more than 46% of the respondents, but most traits had at least one hypothesis that was considered “very likely” by more than 23% and likely (either “very likely” or “moderately likely”) by 72%–90%. Many of the intermediately popular hypotheses divided the respondents rather evenly between those who found them likely and those who found them unlikely (the latter referring to the scores “very unlikely” and “moderately unlikely” combined).

Credibility scores given by survey respondents to hypotheses that aim to explain the evolutionary origin of specific human traits. The hypotheses are sorted in order of decreasing popularity as estimated by the percentage of respondents who scored them likely (i.e., either “very likely” or “moderately likely”). Descriptions of the hypotheses as they were given in the survey are shown in Table  1

A causal relationship between articulate speech and descended larynx was accepted by most respondents, but there was no consensus on the direction of the causality. That the larynx descended because this was required by articulate speech was found likely by 84% and very likely by 43%. At the same time, that the evolution of speech was triggered by the descended larynx was found likely by 61% and very likely by 18%. In fact, 36% of the respondents scored both directions as equally likely.

Traits in the category “other” had only one explanatory hypothesis each in the survey, and this was water‐related. All of these hypotheses received many more “very unlikely” than “very likely” scores. However, four hypotheses (that baby swimming, profuse sweating, diving ability, and magnitude of diving reflex evolved as adaptations to a semi‐aquatic way of life) received so many “moderately likely” scores that the percentage of respondents who found them likely was slightly larger than the percentage who found them unlikely (Figure  4 ).

Details on how the hypotheses were scored by respondents representing different fields of expertise are shown in Figure  5 . In accordance with the statistical test results, most hypotheses received rather similar scores from respondents of all fields of expertise. However, (paleo)anthropologists were clearly more critical than representatives of the other fields in relation to several hypotheses, including: that nakedness evolved to avoid ectoparasites, that the big brain evolved because warfare caused pressure for higher intelligence, and that any traits evolved as adaptations to swimming or diving.

Frequencies of credibility scores given to hypotheses aiming to explain different traits (columns) by respondents of different fields of expertise (rows). In each panel, the answers are, from left to right, “very likely,” moderately likely,” “no opinion,” “moderately unlikely,” and “very unlikely.” Hypotheses that have been included in the aquatic ape hypothesis are shown in shades of blue and green. Those dryland hypotheses for which the opinions of anthropologists and other expertise groups clearly diverged are shown in magenta. The other hypotheses are in shades of brown, with darker colors given to hypotheses that received higher average credibility scores in the survey

There was a lot of variation among the traits in how many of the proposed explanations the respondents found convincing (Figure  6 ). For any one trait, 33%–64% of the respondents did not find any of the proposed hypotheses “very likely,” while 19%–38% found exactly one and 8%–45% more than one. Ten respondents (0.8%) explained that they did not score any of the hypotheses as likely, because they do not believe that humans have evolved at all (most of them explicitly referred to special creation by God).

The number of hypotheses (colors) proposed to explain each human trait (rows) that each respondent found very likely (left panel) or likely (either very likely or moderately likely; right panel). The total number of hypotheses included in the survey is shown after the name of each trait

The survey asked respondents’ opinions on twenty critical arguments that have been presented against the aquatic ape hypothesis. For most arguments, the modal response was “no opinion,” especially among those 43% of the respondents who had never heard of AAH before. Nevertheless, some arguments were clearly more frequently agreed with than others (Figure  7 and Table  3 ). The most widely accepted critique was that not all aquatic mammals have naked skin, so hairlessness cannot be considered an aquatic adaptation. In the other extreme, less than 3% of the respondents fully agreed and less than 12% mostly agreed with the critique that AAH is unscientific or not worthy of attention for the reasons given; in most cases, the number of respondents who strongly disagreed with these critiques was larger than the number who mostly or fully agreed.

The degree to which respondents representing different expertise fields agree with critique presented against the aquatic ape hypothesis. The full description of each point of critique can be found in Table  3

Points of critique presented against the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH). The abbreviations are used in Figure  7 , and the full text is copied verbatim from the survey

4. DISCUSSION

The main results of our survey can be summarized as follows: (1) There was no general agreement among the respondents on why any of the uniquely human traits have evolved: None of the proposed hypotheses was universally either accepted or rejected. (2) For any individual trait, the percentage of respondents who found none of the hypotheses “very likely” was between >30% (bipedalism) and >65% (nakedness). (3) In general, opinions on the credibility of the hypotheses were independent of a person's background (gender, age, field of expertise, degree of scientific experience), but (paleo)anthropologists were clearly more critical than representatives of other fields. (4) The hypotheses that mention adaptation to swimming or diving as an explanatory factor were found much less credible by (paleo)anthropologists and slightly more credible by human biologists than by biologists and representatives of other fields. (5) Most respondents were critical about the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH), but only a small minority considered it to be unscientific.

Of course, all conclusions based on the survey data must be considered tentative only, because the response rate was very low, and it is possible that the results are biased. Members of some subgroup might have been more likely to respond than members of some other subgroup, and the average credibility scores given to the different hypotheses by the respondents may not be representative of the opinions of all scientists in the background population. However, it is unlikely that a lack of general agreement on the drivers of trait evolution or such a clear difference in opinion between (paleo)anthropologists and others could have emerged just as a result of biased sampling.

Our results did not reveal a set of explanations that would collectively provide a coherent and popular scenario for the origin of all (or even many) human traits. Indeed, some of the hypotheses that had almost equal and rather high average credibility scores explained the same trait, whereas for other traits, no hypothesis emerged as particularly popular. Against this background, it is interesting that almost half of the respondents fully or mostly agreed with the statement that the aquatic ape hypothesis “is not needed, because all human traits can be explained by terrestrial scenarios”.

The lack of agreement on why humans evolved the traits we have today is very obvious in our results: No hypothesis was universally accepted, and for most traits, there were several almost equally popular alternative hypotheses rather than one that would generally be considered superior to the others. None of the hypotheses received the score “very likely” from more than half of the respondents or obtained an average credibility score higher than 4.26 (of 5). For hairlessness, the most popular hypothesis was thought to be “very likely” by only 16% of the respondents, and its average credibility score (3.48) was closer to 3 (which is the limit between being considered more likely than unlikely) than to 4 (moderately likely). In addition, for only two of the traits (subcutaneous fat layer and descended larynx), the most popular hypothesis was found at least moderately likely by almost all respondents at the same time as the next most popular hypothesis was found clearly less likely. This may partly reflect the fact that fewer alternative hypotheses have been proposed for these traits than for many of the others included in the survey.

Importantly, lack of agreement did not reflect just ignorance on the topic among nonspecialists, because the responses were, in general, very similar between anthropologists and respondents representing other fields of science. In fact, anthropologists were even more skeptical about all hypotheses than representatives of the other fields were. In other words, outsiders were slightly more convinced that the proposed hypotheses are plausible than those who work in the field. Maybe anthropologists (especially paleoanthropologists) are more systematically trained to be wary of just‐so‐stories (explanations of past events and processes backed up by little or no evidence) than students in nearby fields are. It is also possible that outsiders are somewhat less likely to question hypotheses proposed within an unfamiliar field. This could be because they do not feel qualified to do so, or because they have not heard of the debates that draw attention to the weaknesses of the hypotheses.

Our results conform with the widespread belief that professionals in the field of human evolution are more critical toward the aquatic ape hypothesis (AAH) than outsiders are (Langdon, 1997 ; Bender et al., 2012 ; see also nonscientific sources such as Hawks, 2005 ; Moore, 2012 and Wikipedia: Aquatic Ape Hypothesis: Talk). However, this did not seem to be due to overall scientific ignorance, because how respondents assessed the credibility of the hypotheses proposing adaptation to swimming or diving was independent of both their overall scientific experience level and how they assessed the credibility of the other hypotheses. Interestingly, those whose main field of expertise is human biology had the most positive attitudes toward the water‐related hypotheses, giving them an average credibility score that was as much as 0.9 units higher (on a 1–5 scale) than the average score given by (paleo)anthropologists.

The difference in average opinion between (paleo)anthropologists and other scientists can be interpreted in two opposite ways. On the one hand, those who know the field of human evolution best may be best positioned to make a justified evaluation of the validity of the alternative hypotheses. On the other hand, prior knowledge may induce one to reject unconventional hypotheses offhand merely because they challenge the established paradigms of a field (Bender et al., 2012 ; Klayman, 1995 ). Obviously, the two interpretations lead to opposite conclusions on whether or not the critical attitude of the (paleo)anthropologists can be taken as evidence that AAH is flawed. In our survey, a vast majority of the respondents who had an opinion on the issue disagreed with the statement that AAH can be ignored because its main proponents are not professionals in the field of human evolution. This was the case both overall and within each field of expertise separately, although the proportion of respondents who agreed with the statement was higher among (paleo)anthropologists than among representatives of the other fields.

In this context, it is also interesting that the respondents’ assessment of the credibility of the water‐related hypotheses did not depend on the number of scientific papers they had authored. This indicates that established scientists are no more likely to reject or accept these hypotheses than junior scientists are—unless their scientific experience relates directly to the field of human evolution. A vast majority of the respondents disagreed with the critique that AAH is unscientific. Of course, this does not mean that they would consider the explanations proposed by AAH to be correct, and indeed, all the hypotheses related to AAH received relatively low credibility scores (although not as low as the least popular dryland hypotheses).

If, for the sake of argument, we accept the most popular explanation for each trait to be the correct one, a scenario of evolution by internal drive emerges: The large brain evolved because complex social organization required higher intelligence, the subcutaneous fat layer evolved to serve as an energy reserve for the developing brain, articulate speech evolved because there was social pressure for elaborate communication, the larynx descended because this was required by articulate speech, bipedalism evolved to make the use of tools and weapons easier, and nakedness evolved to avoid overheating when hunting. For most traits, the next most popular explanation was not far behind in popularity. Most of these were also based on inherent drivers, but sometimes in the opposite temporal sequence (e.g., articulate speech was triggered by the descended larynx; large brain evolved because it was required by articulate speech). We found this result disturbing, because the overwhelming popularity of hypotheses based on inherent drivers gives the impression that human evolution is generally thought to have been goal‐directed. This would be in conflict with the current understanding (explained in every evolutionary biology textbook) that evolution has no foresight.

Overall, the survey revealed no general agreement among the respondents: None of the proposed hypotheses on why specific uniquely human traits have evolved was universally either accepted or rejected. Nevertheless, identifying and quantifying what is not generally known and agreed upon can be useful in itself, as it may help to focus future research on answering the most important open questions. Clearly, there is still a long way to go before the question “why are humans so different from other primates” has been answered in a comprehensive and generally satisfactory way.

DATA ACCESSIBILITY

Conflict of interest.

None declared.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

HT designed and conducted the survey and led the writing. All authors discussed the results and planned the data analyses together. The R code used to analyze the data and draw the figures was written by MT with contributions from JT.

Supporting information

Acknowledgments.

We thank Carlos Peña for writing the code to extract respondents’ email addresses from the Internet; Mirkka Jones, Kalle Ruokolainen, and Timo Vuorisalo for comments that helped to improve the survey questions; and Jouko Tuomisto for comments on the manuscript.

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Wanting to understand who we are, where we come from and how we evolved is part of what makes us human.

This an exciting time to be examining human evolution. Intriguing fossil and archaeological discoveries, combined with innovative techniques and DNA research, are transforming scientists' understanding of our ancient past.

We now know of more than 20 hominin species that are part of our family tree. At least half of these species are based on fossils unearthed in the last 30 years.

Museum scientists are at the forefront of research on the migration, characteristics and capabilities of these early human relatives, and the origin and cultural development of our species, Homo sapiens .

Trace the evolution of humans since our lineage split from that of chimpanzees, explore what we have in common with our ancient relatives and discover research that is helping to answer questions about our past and future.

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Embark on a seven-million-year journey of evolution and see fossil and artefact discoveries in the  Human Evolution gallery .

How humans evolved

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Take a tour through seven million years of human evolution and explore the origin of Homo sapiens .

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The Neanderthal in us

Many of us carry around two per cent Neanderthal DNA in our genes. Prof Chris Stringer discusses why and what it means.

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Early human family tree

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HUMAN EVOLUTION

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Australopithecus afarensis, Lucy's species

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Almost 99% of all human ancestors may have been wiped out around 930,000 years ago, a new paper has claimed.

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Melting polar ice caps may have pushed some of the first ancient humans out of Europe.

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In collaboration with Google Arts & Culture

The theory of evolution

Audio exhibition about the theory of evolution, which underpins modern biology. Narrated by Dr Tim Littlewood.

Human origins

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Alice Roberts: How the Museum has inspired me

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Claims that Homo naledi buried their dead could alter our understanding of human evolution

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The sequencing of the oldest human DNA in the UK so far.

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The twelfth century skeletons have provided an unprecedented look at the genetic history of Ashkenazi Jews. 

Prehistoric giant stork competed with 'hobbit' human relative for food

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The first people in Australia likely feasted on the eggs of giant ducks

Genyornis newtoni  may have become extinct after humans stole and ate its eggs.

Fossil tooth could show the mysterious Denisovans made it to southeast Asia

The tooth of a young girl living hundreds of thousands of years ago may be from the Denisovans, an extinct hominid species of which very little is known. 

Oldest evidence of modern humans in western Europe discovered

Modern humans arrived in western Europe about 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.

Human ancestor Homo erectus probably wasn't the carnivore we thought

Evidence of increasing carnivory in ancient humans may just be a quirk of sampling.

Ancient Britons adapted to drink milk a millennium earlier than Europeans

The genetic landscape of England and Wales was shaken up thousands of years ago as new arrivals redefined its people.

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A series of ancient lake beds discovered in Saudi Arabia is showing how the now arid deserts were once green wetlands.

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Fossil evidence of mysterious 'southern Denisovans' yet to be found

When modern humans arrived in the islands of southeast Asia, they may have encountered a range of ancient human species. 

Ancient burials near Stonehenge reveal how cultures merged in the Bronze Age

Rather than a violent turnover of populations, there was a merging of communities.

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Genetic and fossil records do not reveal a single point where modern humans originated, researchers have found. 

Human teeth found in Jersey hint at Neanderthal and Homo sapiens interbreeding

Ancient teeth could be evidence of a hybrid population of Neanderthals and modern humans. 

Some Bronze Age Britons turned the bones of dead relatives into musical instruments

Bronze Age people were keeping human body parts and preserving them.

The earliest art in Britain was created in the Ice Age

Prehistoric societies in the Britain were creating artistic designs on rock as long ago as the late Ice Age.

Human ancestor Homo erectus had the stocky chest of a Neanderthal

New research on Turkana Boy is changing our understanding of the species Homo erectus.

Dating the Broken Hill skull: Homo heidelbergensis was younger than we thought

Africa and Eurasia were inhabited by a whole range of hominin species just a few hundred thousand years ago.

Australopithecus afarensis: Human ancestors had slow-growing brains just like us

Ancient fossils are revealing even more about this species' evolution.

Modern humans may have been in Europe 150,000 years earlier than thought

New dating suggests they were in southern Greece 210,000 years ago. 

Early Neanderthal teeth shed light on the identity of our own ancient ancestors

We've been looking at the wrong species. 

Neolithic Britain: where did the first farmers come from?

The introduction of farming across the world changed the course of human history.

The oldest drawing ever found is a stone 'hashtag'

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Ancient child from Siberia was Neanderthal and Denisovan hybrid

Fragments of bone from a Siberian cave reveal ancient human species were mating.

Ancient human teeth suggest new links between prehistoric African populations

The teeth are helping us to understand how ancient human populations interacted.

The way we have been thinking about the first modern humans in Africa could be wrong

A new paper challenges the traditional idea that our species evolved from a single population in one region of Africa.

New evidence of ancient child sacrifice found in Turkey

Remains of young people who were ritually sacrificed have been found from Bronze Age Mesopotamia.

Creating a computer-generated Neanderthal

Hollywood star Andy Serkis worked with Museum experts to create an animated Neanderthal.

The Beaker people: a new population for ancient Britain

Ancient DNA reveals that the British population was all but wiped out and replaced roughly 4,400 years ago.

Humans left Africa 40,000 years earlier than we thought

A newly-discovered fossil jawbone has revealed that Homo sapiens had already left Africa 180,000 years ago.

Fossil teeth suggest earlier entry of modern humans into SE Asia

New dating of teeth from a cave in western Sumatra, Indonesia, suggests that modern humans were present in tropical southeast Asia earlier than previously thought.

Broken bones may rewrite history of humans in America

Museum human origins expert Chris Stringer comments on research that suggest humans arrived in the Americas much earlier than previously thought.

Oldest known Homo sapiens fossils discovered in Morocco

Prof Chris Stringer comments on new research that has identified the earliest known fossils of our species,  Homo sapiens .

Carved bone reveals rituals of prehistoric cannibals

A patterned prehistoric human bone from an archaeological site in Somerset has revealed that the practices of ancient cannibals were ritualistic, and not simply about survival.

Earliest evidence of modern humans breeding with Neanderthals

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Neanderthals' distinctive face shape explained

Research on a Museum fossil helps explain why Neanderthal faces looked different to our own.

Modern humans reached Asia far earlier than previously thought

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More complexity in early human evolution in East Africa

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Neanderthals and humans had ample time for interbreeding

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Missing human fossils rediscovered

A treasure trove of important human fossils missing for decades has been identified among the Museum’s collections.

Grandpa Neanderthal? ‘Pit of bones’ clues suggest closer link

New research confirms the theory that modern humans and Neanderthals had a common ancestor about 500,000 years ago.

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Ever since Charles Darwin claimed in 1871 that humans and other primates share a common ancestor, people have turned to apes in search of an answer to the age-old question: What makes us human?

A new collaboration between Stanford historians  Jessica Riskin  and  Caroline Winterer  takes up this question, and their efforts have culminated in an exhibition in Green Library’s Hohbach Hall,  The Apes & Us: A Century of Representations of Our Closest Relatives , an accompanying  color catalog , a conference, and most recently, a winter quarter  Introductory Seminar  (IntroSem),  HIST 41Q:  The Ape Museum: Exploring the Idea of the Ape in Global History, Science, Art and Film , where students study with original source material to learn how people have viewed and exploited apes in science and across society through the ages.

“Students can see what people around the world in the 19th century were seeing – it was like the moon landing of the 20th century to suggest that all life on Earth is not only connected, but connected over an enormous span of time in which we all changed and evolved,” said Winterer, the William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies in the School of Humanities & Sciences (H&S) and the author of a forthcoming book,  How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America . “As Darwin himself put it, there’s ‘grandeur in this view of life.’ ”

But as her collaboration with Riskin shows, that revelation has been controversial from the beginning. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, evolution and primatology have been entangled with race, ideology, and politics.

“When you think historically about the relationship of humans to nonhuman primates, you can connect current ideas and attitudes in science and culture with their now hidden roots in the past,” said Riskin, the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History in H&S.

Gabriel von Max (1840-1915) Abelard und Héloïse , c. 1900-1915, oil on canvas. (Image credit: Courtesy Jack Daulton Collection)

Grappling with a paradigm shift in science

The course and exhibition on the primates and people began after Riskin visited an exhibition in 2021 at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, The Origins of the World: The Invention of Nature in the Nineteenth Century .

Riskin described some of the items  in an essay for  the New York Review of Books , including the small selection of paintings by the eccentric Czech-Austrian artist Gabriel von Max (1840-1915) showing his pet monkeys assuming human-like positions and roles. Riskin described how von Max – who was an avid Darwinian as well as a painter – anthropomorphized non-human primates to emphasize Darwin’s theories that apes were closely connected to humans.

Riskin’s essay caught the attention of lawyer turned art collector Jack Daulton, who had loaned some von Max paintings to the Musée d’Orsay from his private collection. He contacted Riskin to say he lived near the Stanford campus and asked if Riskin and her students would be interested in seeing other von Max works he owns, to which Riskin enthusiastically responded, yes.

Gabriel von Max, Schlechte Zeiten / Bad Times , 1915, oil on canvas. (Image credit: Courtesy Jack Daulton Collection)

Gabriel von Max (1840-1915), Geburtstagblumen / Birthday Flowers , c. 1890, oil on wood panel. (Image credit: Courtesy Jack Daulton Collection)

Now, some 13 paintings by von Max from Daulton’s collection are on view in Hohbach Hall, including the iconic image of two capuchin monkeys holding one another tenderly, even mournfully. The painting is named after the tragic star-crossed lovers from the 12th century, Abelard and Héloïse.

In addition, there are six glass cases with items from Stanford’s own collections that show the many ways artists and scholars – at Stanford and elsewhere – have examined the differences and similarities between people and primates throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

For example, there is a case on posture that includes an 1863 copy of Thomas Henry Huxley’s notorious diagram comparing a human skeleton to that of a gorilla, chimpanzee, orangutan, and gibbon as a way to show how our place in nature is in step with apes.

An original copy of Huxley’s diagram is on view at the Apes & Us exhibition. (Image credit: Courtesy Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries Collections)

Another case looks at tools and the hands that made them. Some have argued – such as Friederich Engels, a collaborator and close friend of Karl Marx – that the main differentiator between humans and apes is tool use. In the case is a first edition of the book from the Stanford University Archives in which Engels makes his argument.

The exhibit also shows some of the dangerous ways that differences drawn between human and non-human primates have been used to create imaginary racial and class hierarchies.

Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, invoked his own interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution to found eugenics, a field devoted to “improving” the human population through selective breeding and controlled reproduction.

One case in  The Apes & Us exhibit looks at the role that the evolutionary biologist, ichthyologist, and first president of Stanford, David Starr Jordan, played in the eugenics movement in the United States.

Throughout the cases are various materials from the personal papers of Stephen J. Gould, the influential paleontologist, historian, and evolutionary biologist who spent much of his career rebutting scientific racism and biological deterministic theories. The exhibition calls attention to his 1981 book,  The Mismeasure of Man , in which Gould confronts some of the pervasive tropes about race and intelligence that were prevalent throughout the Victorian era and early 20th century.

There is also a case on primate research at Stanford, including images from the Stanford Outdoor Primate Facility (SOPF) that British primatologist Jane Goodall established in 1974 with David Hamburg, Stanford professor of human biology. Their research became mired in controversy and SOPF closed in 1979.

Learning the history of science and ideas

Studying how humans have interacted with primates in a post-Darwin age is what Winterer calls a “boundary case” where different historical, political, and social perspectives can be brought to bear.

“Whenever you explore a boundary case, you’re also exploring connections,” Winterer said. “When do we erect boundaries between things? When do we create connections across boundaries? We can apply those questions to almost every domain of human thought. The ape and the human boundary or connection is really just one of many such inquiries we can make.”

Crossing in and out of these boundaries was a goal of Riskin’s and Winterer’s IntroSem.

Appropriately titled  The Ape Museum , their course was held in Hohbach Hall, where each week, students interacted with items in the  Apes & U s exhibit.

Students also looked at objects held elsewhere on campus, including at the Stanford University Archaeology Collections, where curator Danielle Raad presented tools and other artifacts made by human ancestors, including some estimated to be between 300,000 to 1.75 million years old.

Francesca Pinney (left) and Megan Liu (right) hold ancient artifacts on a class visit to the Stanford University Archaeology Collections. (Image credit: Danielle Raad)

For freshman Francesca Pinney, holding something so distant in time and space from her was stirring. “History never felt closer,” she said.

The class also visited the Hoover Institution Library & Archives, where  Jean M. Cannon , a research fellow and curator for North American Collections, pulled out propaganda  from their world-renowned poster collection  that showed how apes were used in World War I and II by both Allied and Axis powers to dehumanize the enemy.

Pinney said she was particularly struck by how apes were used in racist ways and the far-reaching consequences that imagery had in society.

“It was disturbing to see some of this propaganda that was so influential in dehumanizing various populations,” Pinney said. “The most haunting part of seeing those pieces of propaganda was [realizing] the prevalence of such disturbing racial components and how successful it was.”

Megan Liu, a sophomore in the course, had a similar reaction when viewing the propaganda posters – some of which were up to 4 feet wide.

“Just seeing them in their original state really showcased how effective it can be because it’s very in your face. It’s very loud. And it’s very bold,” Liu said. “It was a completely different experience seeing them at the Hoover Archive than seeing them [reprinted] on a regular piece of paper.”

The course also featured guest speakers, including course assistant Noah Sveiven, a Stanford senior who talked about his honors thesis research investigating the history of primate science at Stanford and SOPF.

SOPF facility, c. 1974. (Image credit: Stanford University; Archives Peninsula-Times Tribune, Stanford University photographs)

The class also took an optional visit to the San Francisco Zoo, which included a poignant moment for the group with Oscar Jonesy, a 43-year-old silverback western lowland gorilla. When he saw the group entering his enclosure, he approached them and watched them – calmly and intensely – until they disappeared from view.

“It was a stare full of meaning and import somehow,” Riskin recalled of the visit. “That encounter with Oscar gave me a pang to think that he’s lived his whole life in captivity.”

Indeed, an unsettling discomfort can emerge when thinking about the treatment and ethical implications of our closest evolutionary counterparts.

It is that proximity that makes primate science controversial, said Riskin.

“All of our uncertainties, anxieties, convictions, and our whole psyche with regard to humans and humaneness comes out in primate research,” Riskin said.

Apes & Us is on view at Hohbach Hall, located on the first floor of the East Wing of the Green Library, until June 2024.

Stanford Global Studies, which is part of H&S, helped fund the course through  a Course Innovation Award  which supports the development of new courses focused on global topics.

At the Smithsonian | December 27, 2022

Fourteen Discoveries Made About Human Evolution in 2022

Smithsonian paleoanthropologists reveal the year’s most riveting findings about our close relatives and ancestors

A team led by Laurits Skov and Benjamin Peter from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology sequenced nuclear, mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA of 13 Neanderthal individuals. From these sequences, they determined that two of the Neanderthals represent a father-daughter pair and that another two are cousins.

Ryan McRae and Briana Pobiner

With many projects around the world proceeding despite the Covid-19 pandemic, researchers across a variety of fields made multiple exciting breakthroughs on human origins, gaining more insight into topics ranging from food and drink to interspecies cooperation.

Telling us more about our food, our health, our close relatives and ancestors, and even our animal friends, these 14 new discoveries scientists made this year shed more light on what it means to be human.

Meat, fire and beer: origins of modern food staples

For decades, one of the hallmarks of human evolution has been the presumed shift from a predominantly plant-based diet to one that included significant amounts of meat and animal tissue. Scientists surmised that since meat is generally more nutrient-dense, more meat-eating could have allowed our ancestors, beginning with the emergence of Homo erectus around 2 million years ago, to evolve the large and energetically demanding brains that we associate with our own species.

But the question remained: Did meat consumption actually increase after this time, inferred by stone tool butchery marks on fossilized bones, or is there just more fossil material overall from that period—making it more likely to find these butchery marks?

In January, W. Andrew Barr from George Washington University and colleagues examined all the fossil evidence for butchery in eastern Africa from 1.2 million years ago and older. They concluded that the evidence for increased carnivory in our ancestors is merely an effect of increased sampling of the archaeological record at certain time intervals starting around two million years ago, meaning that there is no strong relationship between eating more meat and the evolution of larger brains in our ancestors.

Well, if it wasn’t meat eating that enabled big brains to evolve, maybe it was cooking?

Cooking makes food easier to digest, allowing for the extraction of more nutrients from food while expending less energy. The earliest evidence for human control of fire dates back to at least one million years ago, but the earliest evidence for using fire to cook food is much more recent.

In November, a team led by Irit Zohar from Tel Aviv University made breakthrough discoveries from the Israeli site Gesher Benot Ya’aqov that pushed this date back to around 600,000 years ago with new evidence for hominins cooking fish. Teeth of a species of carp were subjected to temperatures required to cook fish, but not as hot as temperatures directly inside a fire would be. This indicates the fish were placed above or next to the fire for cooking rather than being discarded in the fire or burned accidentally.

Of course, what good is barbecue without a tasty beverage to wash it down? In December 2021, a team led by Jiajing Wang from Dartmouth University uncovered the oldest known beer production in the world in Egypt. Made of fermented grains, the production of beer is closely linked to the emergence and spread of agricultural societies.

Dating to 5,800 years ago, hundreds of years before Egypt’s first pharaoh, this beer was thick like a porridge rather than watery and probably used for both daily consumption and ritual purposes. Yum?

Animal friends and animal food: origins of domestication and cooperation

Whether for work, companionship or food, domesticated animals make modern human existence possible. But do human impacts on animal communities in a broader sense date back far earlier than evidence for domestication?

In July, a team led by Danielle Fraser from the Canadian Museum of Nature quantified species evenness in North America over the past 20,000 years and found that there were two periods when the diversity of animal communities notably decreased. The first, around 10,000 years ago, was associated with the North American megafauna extinction. The other occurred around 2,000 years ago during a period in which agriculture spread rapidly and population sizes boomed.

This study demonstrates that humans can affect, and have affected, animal communities in indirect ways in addition to hunting and domestication.

When it comes to domesticated animals, perhaps none captures the imagination and our emotions like humankind’s best friend—the dog.

Dogs are also currently the earliest known domesticated animal on earth. A June study led by Anders Bergström and Pontus Skoglund of the Francis Crick Institute looked at genomes of ancient wolves, from whom our species domesticated the modern dog, to try to determine where and when the connection between humans and dogs began.

They found that ancient wolf populations in North America, Europe and Siberia were interconnected with each other in the past rather than being separate populations as they are today, and that all dogs included in the study are most closely related to wolves from eastern Eurasia rather than from western Eurasia.

However, ancient wolves in southwest Eurasia made significant contributions to the genome of dogs originating from the Near East and Africa—either indicating a separate domestication process or, more likely, interbreeding with that additional wolf population early in the process (just as early members of our own species interbred with Neanderthals when we first left Africa).

While this study points strongly to eastern Eurasia as the geographic source of modern dogs, none of the ancient wolf populations studied were the direct ancestor of modern dogs, meaning that the true dog ancestor (or ancestors) is yet to be found.

In addition to companionship, humans also domesticated animals for food and to assist with work. A study in June led by Joris Peters from Ludwig Maximilian University Munich and Greger Larson from the University of Oxford traced the origin of chicken domestication to around 1650 B.C.E. in Thailand, corresponding to the spread of grains (specifically rice and millet). Chickens then appear to follow the grains as they spread around the world as a food source.

Clearly, modern humans owe a lot to our animal friends, and new finds continue to shed light on where, when and how these interspecies interactions first emerged.

New fossils shed light on old ancestors: discoveries from our earliest and most recent evolutionary history

As in previous years, 2022 revealed more fossil finds tied to our human lineage’s earliest history.

One of the first possible hominins, Sahelanthropus tchadensis , dates to around six to seven million years ago and was found in Chad in Central Africa. This species was previously known only by cranial remains and a partial femur, but in August a team led by Guillaume Daver and Franck Guy from the University of Poitiers reinterpreted the femur (upper leg bone) and described two ulnae (forearm bones). These ulnae share many affinities with our ape relatives and suggest that while Sahelanthropus may have been bipedal on the ground, its arms were still well adapted to climbing and clambering in trees.

On the more recent side of prehistory: New fossils of the enigmatic Denisovans , known mostly from their DNA, are starting to tell us more about where they lived and what they looked like. Following up on a Denisovan mandible found in Tibet in 2019, a Denisovan molar was recently discovered in Laos. Dating to between 130,000 to 160,000 years old, this is the first Denisovan fossil found in a geographic area where scientists now know their DNA wound up. Many populations of modern Southeast Asian, Papuan and Filipino people have some Denisovan DNA in them— up to five percent in one Indigenous Filipino group . We’re looking forward to more new finds of Denisovan fossils to tell us more about who they were and what they looked like, as well as when and how they interacted with our own species.

Speaking of species interactions, new finds in February from a cave in southeast France are complicating the story of human-Neanderthal co-occupation of Europe. A team led by Ludovic Slimak from the University of Toulouse unearthed evidence of hominin occupation at a site called Grotte Mandrin in France: First Neanderthals were there, then modern humans, then Neanderthals again before modern humans became the only hominin in Europe.

From both lithic and fossil evidence, this modern human occupation dates to older than 50,000 years ago, almost 10,000 years older than the previous record for modern humans in this region. This evidence tells us that not only did Neanderthals and modern humans live in the same area for a long span of time (potentially implying that our presence in Europe did not drive Neanderthals to extinction), but also that these two species occupied the same site alternately. This extended timespan of interaction could have implications for genetics as well, potentially adding another data point to the where and when of modern human-Neanderthal interbreeding .

Friends and family ties in modern apes and Neanderthals

While most studies of apes focus on groups of only one species at a time, some apes, like chimpanzees and gorillas, do overlap in multiple locations—providing an opportunity to observe the interactions between them. Often when two closely related species overlap in range, their actions are predominantly antagonistic or aggressive toward the other group.

But in the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Congo Republic, chimpanzees and gorillas have been observed being downright friendly with each other. From the two species foraging in the same tree, to their young playing with each other, to individuals forming lasting friendships, chimps and gorillas have generally gotten along over the 20-year period of study led by Crickette Sanz of Washington University in St. Louis, which was announced in October. This interspecies cooperation may offer a large advantage in deterring predators like leopards and in helping each other find valuable food sources.

While it is relatively straightforward to observe group dynamics in living apes, figuring out how now-extinct early human groups lived and interacted is much trickier, as population-level studies require multiple fossils from the same site at the same time period.

Between two cave sites in southern Siberia (the Chagyrskaya and Okladnikov caves), in October a team led by Laurits Skov and Benjamin Peter from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology sequenced nuclear, mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA of 13 Neanderthal individuals. From these sequences, they determined that two of the Neanderthals represent a father-daughter pair and that another two are cousins.

Additionally, evidence points to one-third of the Neanderthals being part of the same tightly knit community living around 54,000 years ago. Such small-scale resolution is almost unheard of in paleoanthropology. Analysis of the Y-chromosome (passed on through males) and mitochondrial (passed on through females) DNA reveals that the individuals had significantly less diverse Y-chromosome DNA, indicating that Neanderthal females were the ones to relocate to different groups, diversifying the mitochondrial DNA gene pool—in much the same pattern as has been observed in living chimpanzees.

These findings give us new insights into Neanderthal social structure, and potentially even to how interbreeding with our own species may have occurred.

How disease shapes us, and how we evolved to treat it

Modern medicine is thought to have arisen at least by the time of agriculture and large-scale population centers, possibly as a result of their development. More people means more disease, and humans would have looked for new ways to treat diseases. But something as medically complex as limb amputations were only known to occur as far back as 7,000 years ago and were not commonly known until a few hundred years ago, long after the rise of agricultural societies.

However, a new finding out of Borneo in Indonesia pushes this date back to as much as 31,000 years ago. A team led by Tim Maloney from Griffith University in Australia suggests that this individual appears to have had their leg surgically amputated just above the ankle, and then proceeded to live for another six to nine years based on bone remodeling around the amputation site. This evidence implies that modern humans had complex medical knowledge, such as how to locate and sever blood vessels, nerves, muscle tissue and bone, both safely and effectively, long before the advent of agriculture.

Yet, medicinal knowledge is not relegated to our own species. While animals like elephants, bears and other apes have been known to ingest material for medicinal purposes, it was not until this year that a team led by Simone Pika from the University of Osnabrück observed apes using topical ointments for healing . After catching insects, the wild chimpanzees from the Rekambo community in Gabon then squished them between their lips, rubbed the insect in the wound and removed the insect afterward.

The truly groundbreaking part of the study, announced in February, is that the chimpanzees treated not only their own wounds but also other chimps’ wounds. This sort of caring behavior was assumed to be reserved for our own species, but it seems like caring for others in one’s community could have deeper roots in our evolutionary history.

Another new study out in July led by Pascal Gagneux and Ajit Varki of the University of California San Diego looked at the intersection of medicine and genetics to explore why modern humans have developed such a long post-reproductive lifespan.

The “ grandmother hypothesis ” posits that modern humans live well past sexual maturity in order to care for family members, specifically grandchildren. But when did this long lifespan evolve— and how? A specific gene that produces immune receptors (like specialized parts of immune system cells) called CD33 allows modern humans to prevent some side effects of aging, specifically protecting the brain from inflammation and dementia. The gene for these CD33 receptors is not present in Neanderthals or Denisovans, meaning that it could be one advantage our species had over them, but it also means we had to have acquired it on our own rather than inheriting the gene from a common ancestor. One hypothesis this study explored comes from reproductive health: the idea that we evolved these receptors to fight gonorrhea bacteria. The bacterium coats itself in sugars to mimic the human body, and our version of the CD33 receptors can effectively fight it—sparing our reproductive health. This potentially indicates that this adaptation to reproductive health could have been co-opted by the human body to allow for longer lifespans. In other words, we evolved the CD33 receptors to fight gonorrhea, and as a result our bodies could fight against dementia and allow us to become grandparents.

Most notable: a new 2022 Nobel Laureate

While important strides have been made in genetics and human evolution in the past year, the most notable achievement must go to a new Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo . Born in Sweden in 1955, Pääbo has long been a leader in the field of ancient DNA, especially when it comes to humans and our closest relatives.

In 2010, Pääbo’s team deciphered the Neanderthal genome, unlocking a whole new realm of anthropological insight. Pääbo has also been at the forefront of new discoveries in anthropology, including identifying the Denisovans and understanding the genetic relationships among Denisovans, Neanderthals and our own species, as well as identifying the first early human Neanderthal-Denisovan hybrid . For these reasons and more, Pääbo was awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, a fantastic way to round out 2022. Congratulations!

A version of this article was originally published on the PLOS SciComm blog.

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Ryan McRae | READ MORE

Dr. Ryan McRae is a paleoanthropologist studying the hominin fossil record on a macroscopic scale. He currently works for the National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program as a contractor focusing on research, education, and outreach, and is an adjunct assistant professor of anatomy at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Briana Pobiner | READ MORE

Briana Pobiner is a paleoanthropologist with the National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program . She lead's the program's education and outreach efforts. 

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Wednesday, May 29, 2024

Scientists generate the first complete chromosome sequences from non-human primates

Complete X and Y chromosome sequences from six primate species reveal species diversity and insights into evolution.

A team of researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health have generated the first complete chromosome sequences from non-human primates. Published in Nature , these sequences uncover remarkable variation between the Y chromosomes of different species, showing rapid evolution, in addition to revealing previously unstudied regions of great ape genomes. Since these primate species are the closest living relatives to humans, the new sequences can provide insights into human evolution.

The researchers focused on the X and Y chromosomes, which play roles in sexual development and fertility, among many other biological functions. They sequenced chromosomes from five great ape species, chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, as well as one other primate species that is more distantly related to humans, the siamang gibbon.

“These chromosome sequences add a significant amount of new information,” said Brandon Pickett, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH, and an author of the study. “Only the chimpanzee genome sequence was fairly complete before this, but even that still had large gaps, especially in regions of repetitive DNA.”

Analyzing these new sequences, the researchers estimated that 62 to 66% of the X chromosomes and 75 to 82% of the Y chromosomes are composed of repetitive DNA sequences. These sequences are much more challenging for scientists to characterize, and studying repetitive DNA has only become possible in recent years due to new DNA sequencing technologies and analysis methods.

The researchers compared the sequences of the ape chromosomes to the human X and Y chromosomes to understand their evolutionary histories. Like the human X and Y, the great ape Y chromosomes have far fewer genes compared to the X chromosomes. The researchers also used a computational method called alignment, which indicates regions of the chromosome that have stayed relatively the same over the course of evolution, revealing the effects of different evolutionary pressures on different parts of the genome.

The researchers found that over 90% of the ape X chromosome sequences aligned to the human X chromosome, showing that the X chromosomes have remained relatively unchanged over millions of years of evolution. However, only 14% to 27% of the ape Y chromosome sequences aligned to the human Y chromosome.

“The extent of the differences between the Y chromosomes of these species was very surprising,” said Kateryna Makova, Ph.D., a professor at Pennsylvania State University and leader of the study. “Some of these species diverged from the human lineage only seven million years ago, which is not a lot of time in terms of evolution. This shows that the Y chromosomes are evolving very fast.”

A notable difference among the primate Y chromosomes is their length. For example, the Y chromosome from the Sumatran orangutan is twice as long as the gibbon’s Y chromosome. Variation in the number and types of DNA repeats accounts for some of the differences in chromosome lengths.

One type of repeat is called a palindrome, a DNA sequence which contains inverted DNA repeats. DNA palindromes are similar to language palindromes such as “racecar” or “kayak,” in which the letters in the first half of the word repeat in reverse in the second half of the word, so the sequence of the letters is the same forwards and backwards. However, the DNA palindromes can be over one hundred thousand letters long.

The researchers found that the DNA palindromes on the primate X and Y chromosomes almost always contain genes, which repeat in many copies along the length of the chromosome. Most genes in primate genomes have only two copies, one on each chromosome in a pair. Researchers suspect that having many copies in these palindromes helps to protect genes, especially on the Y chromosome. Since there is typically only one Y chromosome per cell, if a gene on the Y chromosome is damaged, there is not another chromosome with a copy of the gene that can be used as a template to repair the damage.

“Having these genes in palindromes is like keeping a backup copy,” said Adam Phillippy, Ph.D., a senior investigator at NHGRI and senior author of the study. “We know that many of these genes are performing important functions, and so we expected to see the same genes in palindromes across different species, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.”

The researchers studied several groups of genes contained within the palindromes, many of which play roles in sperm production and are thus important for fertility. While palindromes were found on all the primate Y chromosomes studied, the specific palindrome sequences and the genes contained in these palindromes were often distinct for each species.

“There may be even more variation we’re not yet seeing,” said Dr. Phillippy. “On the human Y chromosome, some genes can vary in number between individuals. For each of these other primate species, we’re only looking at a single individual. We don’t know what the rest of the population looks like yet and what other variations we might find.”

“However, we have some insights from prior work by our group that suggests extensive variation in the number of copies of Y chromosome genes in humans and other apes,” Dr. Makova added.

These great ape chromosome sequences also resolve the sequences of another type of repeat called a DNA satellite, which is a large stretch of repeating sequence. Among the great ape chromosomes, the researchers identified several previously unknown, species-specific satellite sequences.

These sequences provide important insights into great ape genomes, as DNA satellites are present across the genome. Specifically, they are concentrated near the ends of chromosomes, called telomeres, and in another region called a centromere, which helps the chromosomes organize during cell division. The centromere sequences of these species were completely unknown before this study and another recent research effort conducted by many of the same researchers .

“Having these satellite sequences from great apes open up new territory to explore,” said Dr. Makova, “and similar to our other findings about the Y chromosome, we can see that the centromere of the Y chromosome is highly dynamic.”

These chromosome sequences can help researchers study the evolution of great apes, including humans. The researchers are currently working to describe the entire genomes of these great ape species, but even alone, the X and Y chromosome sequences offer many insights, especially about the evolutionary forces on the Y chromosome that contribute to its rapid evolution.

One factor is that there is typically only one Y chromosome per cell, which leads to accumulating changes to the DNA sequence. Another evolutionary force, Dr. Makova said, is a phenomenon known as male mutation bias. Compared to egg production, sperm production involves more DNA replication. With each replication, there is a chance that the DNA sequence changes. This affects all chromosomes but is particularly impactful for the Y chromosome.

Another potential factor is having a small population size, which can influence evolutionary rates. Not only do these ape species have limited populations in the wild, but the Y chromosomes are only present in half the population, further limiting the effective population size of this particular part of the genome.

“It’s important to remember that these great ape species are all endangered,” said Dr. Makova. “Not only can we learn about human evolution from these sequences, but we can apply what we know about their genomes and human genomes to better understand the biology and reproduction of these endangered species.”

The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI)  is one of the 27 institutes and centers at the NIH, an agency of the Department of Health and Human Services. The NHGRI Division of Intramural Research develops and implements technology to understand, diagnose and treat genomic and genetic diseases. Additional information about NHGRI can be found at:  https://www.genome.gov .

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH):  NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit  www.nih.gov .

About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation's medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit www.nih.gov .

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The 1.6 million-year-old discovery that changes what we know about human evolution

New research has pinpointed the likely time in prehistory when humans first began to speak.

Analysis by British archaeologist Steven Mithen suggests that early humans first developed rudimentary language around 1.6 million years ago – somewhere in eastern or southern Africa.

“Humanity’s development of the ability to speak was without doubt the key which made much of subsequent human physical and cultural evolution possible. That’s why dating the emergence of the earliest forms of language is so important,” Dr Mithen, professor of early prehistory at the University of Reading, told The Independent.

Until recently, most human evolution experts thought humans only started speaking around 200,000 years ago. Professor Mithen’s new research, published this month, suggests that rudimentary human language is at least eight times older. His analysis is based on a detailed study of all the available archaeological, paleo-anatomical, genetic, neurological and linguistic evidence.

When combined, all the evidence suggests that the birth of language occurred as part of a suite of human evolution and other developments between two and 1.5 million years ago.

Significantly, human brain size increased particularly rapidly from 2 million BC, especially after 1.5 million BC. Associated with that brain size increase was a reorganisation of the internal structure of the brain – including the first appearance of the area of the frontal lobe, specifically associated with language production and language comprehension. Known to scientists as Broca’s area, it seems to have evolved out of earlier structures responsible for early humanity’s ability to communicate with hand and arm gestures.

New scientific research suggests that the appearance of Broca’s area was also linked to improvements in working memory – a factor crucial to sentence formation. But other evolutionary developments were also crucial for the birth of rudimentary language. The emergence, around 1.8 million years ago, of a more advanced form of bipedalism, together with changes in the shape of the human skull, almost certainly began the process of changing the shape and positioning of the vocal tract, thus making speech possible.

Other key evidence pointing to around 1.6 million BC as the approximate date humans started speaking, comes from the archaeological record. Compared to many other animals, humans were not particularly strong. To survive and prosper, they needed to compensate for that relative physical weakness.

In evolutionary terms, language was almost certainly part of that physical strength compensation strategy. In order to hunt large animals (or, when scavenging, to repel physically strong animal rivals), early humans needed greater group planning and coordination abilities – the development of language would have been crucial in facilitating that. Significantly, date-wise, human hunting began around two million years ago – but seems to have substantially accelerated by around 1.5 million years ago. Around 1.6 million BC also saw the birth and inter-generational cultural transmission of much more sophisticated stone tool technology. That long-term transfer of complex knowledge and skills from generation to generation also strongly implies the existence of speech.

What’s more, linguistic communication was probably crucial in allowing humans to survive in different ecological and climatic zones – it’s probably no coincidence that humans were able to massively accelerate their colonisation of the world around 1.4 million years ago, ie, shortly after the likely date of the birth of language. Language enabled humans to do three key forward-looking things – to conceive of and plan future actions and to pass on knowledge.

“That’s how language changed the human story so profoundly,” said Professor Mithen. His new research, outlined in a new book, The Language Puzzle , published this month, suggests that before around 1.6 million years ago, humans had had a much more limited communication ability – probably just a few dozen different noises and arm gestures which could only be deployed in specific contexts and could not, therefore, be used for forward-planning. For planning, basic grammar and individual words were needed.

Professor Mithen’s research also suggests that there appears to be some continuity between very early human languages and modern ones. He believes that, remarkably, some aspects of that first linguistic development 1.6 million years ago still survive in modern languages today. He is proposing that words, which – through their sounds or length – describe the objects they stand for, were almost certainly among the first words uttered by early humans.

Indeed, future research may be able to tentatively recreate the likely organisation and structure of those first languages. Although the birth of language seems to have occurred around 1.6 million years ago, that birth represented the beginning of linguistic development, not its culmination.

For hundreds of thousands of years, language only very gradually became more complex, ultimately gaining in sophistication after the emergence of anatomically modern humans 150,000 years ago.

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• Akhila Rajan

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• Anthropology
• Archaeology
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• Cultural evolution
• Evolutionary developmental biology
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• Chemical origin of life
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A theory of evolutionary dynamics on any complex population structure reveals stem cell niche architecture as a spatial suppressor of selection

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The complete sequence and comparative analysis of ape sex chromosomes

Reference assemblies of great ape sex chromosomes show that Y chromosomes are more variable in size and sequence than X chromosomes and provide a resource for studies on human evolution and conservation genetics of non-human apes.

• Kateryna D. Makova
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Scientists generate the first complete chromosome sequences from non-human primates

by NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute

A team of researchers have generated the first complete chromosome sequences from non-human primates. Published in Nature , these sequences uncover remarkable variation between the Y chromosomes of different species, showing rapid evolution, in addition to revealing previously unstudied regions of great ape genomes. Since these primate species are the closest living relatives to humans, the new sequences can provide insights into human evolution.

The researchers focused on the X and Y chromosomes, which play roles in sexual development and fertility, among many other biological functions. They sequenced chromosomes from five great ape species, chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla and Bornean and Sumatran orangutans, as well as one other primate species that is more distantly related to humans, the siamang gibbon.

"These chromosome sequences add a significant amount of new information," said Brandon Pickett, Ph.D., a postdoctoral fellow at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of NIH, and an author of the study. "Only the chimpanzee genome sequence was fairly complete before this, but even that still had large gaps, especially in regions of repetitive DNA."

Analyzing these new sequences, the researchers estimated that 62 to 66% of the X chromosomes and 75 to 82% of the Y chromosomes are composed of repetitive DNA sequences. These sequences are much more challenging for scientists to characterize, and studying repetitive DNA has only become possible in recent years due to new DNA sequencing technologies and analysis methods.

The researchers compared the sequences of the ape chromosomes to the human X and Y chromosomes to understand their evolutionary histories. Like the human X and Y, the great ape Y chromosomes have far fewer genes compared to the X chromosomes.

The researchers also used a computational method called alignment, which indicates regions of the chromosome that have stayed relatively the same over the course of evolution, revealing the effects of different evolutionary pressures on different parts of the genome.

The researchers found that over 90% of the ape X chromosome sequences aligned to the human X chromosome, showing that the X chromosomes have remained relatively unchanged over millions of years of evolution. However, only 14% to 27% of the ape Y chromosome sequences aligned to the human Y chromosome.

"The extent of the differences between the Y chromosomes of these species was very surprising," said Kateryna Makova, Ph.D., a professor at Pennsylvania State University and leader of the study. "Some of these species diverged from the human lineage only seven million years ago, which is not a lot of time in terms of evolution. This shows that the Y chromosomes are evolving very fast."

A notable difference among the primate Y chromosomes is their length. For example, the Y chromosome from the Sumatran orangutan is twice as long as the gibbon's Y chromosome. Variation in the number and types of DNA repeats accounts for some of the differences in chromosome lengths.

One type of repeat is called a palindrome, a DNA sequence which contains inverted DNA repeats. DNA palindromes are similar to language palindromes such as "racecar" or "kayak," in which the letters in the first half of the word repeat in reverse in the second half of the word, so the sequence of the letters is the same forwards and backwards. However, the DNA palindromes can be over one hundred thousand letters long.

The researchers found that the DNA palindromes on the primate X and Y chromosomes almost always contain genes, which repeat in many copies along the length of the chromosome. Most genes in primate genomes have only two copies, one on each chromosome in a pair.

Researchers suspect that having many copies in these palindromes helps to protect genes, especially on the Y chromosome. Since there is typically only one Y chromosome per cell, if a gene on the Y chromosome is damaged, there is not another chromosome with a copy of the gene that can be used as a template to repair the damage.

"Having these genes in palindromes is like keeping a backup copy," said Adam Phillippy, Ph.D., a senior investigator at NHGRI and senior author of the study. "We know that many of these genes are performing important functions, and so we expected to see the same genes in palindromes across different species, but this doesn't seem to be the case."

The researchers studied several groups of genes contained within the palindromes, many of which play roles in sperm production and are thus important for fertility. While palindromes were found on all the primate Y chromosomes studied, the specific palindrome sequences and the genes contained in these palindromes were often distinct for each species.

"There may be even more variation we're not yet seeing," said Dr. Phillippy. "On the human Y chromosome, some genes can vary in number between individuals. For each of these other primate species , we're only looking at a single individual. We don't know what the rest of the population looks like yet and what other variations we might find."

"However, we have some insights from prior work by our group that suggests extensive variation in the number of copies of Y chromosome genes in humans and other apes," Dr. Makova added.

These great ape chromosome sequences also resolve the sequences of another type of repeat called a DNA satellite, which is a large stretch of repeating sequence. Among the great ape chromosomes, the researchers identified several previously unknown, species-specific satellite sequences.

These sequences provide important insights into great ape genomes, as DNA satellites are present across the genome. Specifically, they are concentrated near the ends of chromosomes, called telomeres, and in another region called a centromere, which helps the chromosomes organize during cell division. The centromere sequences of these species were completely unknown before this study and another recent research effort conducted by many of the same researchers .

"Having these satellite sequences from great apes open up new territory to explore," said Dr. Makova, "and similar to our other findings about the Y chromosome, we can see that the centromere of the Y chromosome is highly dynamic."

These chromosome sequences can help researchers study the evolution of great apes, including humans. The researchers are currently working to describe the entire genomes of these great ape species, but even alone, the X and Y chromosome sequences offer many insights, especially about the evolutionary forces on the Y chromosome that contribute to its rapid evolution .

One factor is that there is typically only one Y chromosome per cell, which leads to accumulating changes to the DNA sequence. Another evolutionary force, Dr. Makova said, is a phenomenon known as male mutation bias. Compared to egg production, sperm production involves more DNA replication. With each replication, there is a chance that the DNA sequence changes. This affects all chromosomes but is particularly impactful for the Y chromosome.

Another potential factor is having a small population size, which can influence evolutionary rates. Not only do these ape species have limited populations in the wild, but the Y chromosomes are only present in half the population, further limiting the effective population size of this particular part of the genome.

"It's important to remember that these great ape species are all endangered," said Dr. Makova. "Not only can we learn about human evolution from these sequences, but we can apply what we know about their genomes and human genomes to better understand the biology and reproduction of these endangered species."

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Evolutionary biologist suggests human brain grew as energy was freed from ovarian follicles

by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

Mauricio González-Forero, an evolutionary biologist at the University of St Andrews, in the U.K., is proposing a new theory to explain the massive growth of the human brain over its evolutionary history.

In his paper published in the journal Nature Human Behavior , he suggests that the human brain was primed to grow due to a variety of factors and only took off when energy previously used to maintain ovarian follicles was freed up, allowing the brain to use more than its prior share.

Over the years, many theories have been proposed to explain the growth of the human brain compared to that of early contemporaries such as the great apes. Many such theories revolve around humans descending from trees to become social foragers.

In more recent times, some have suggested that our brains grew larger as our intestines grew smaller, due to switching to a fermented diet, thereby freeing up resources.

González-Forero has previously proposed other theories, most of which involve changes to the body that freed up resources, resulting in changes to the way the body allocated energy resources . In this new effort, he suggests that one such overlooked change might be the ovaries.

González-Forero began his study by noting that most theories seeking to explain brain growth have not been backed up by hard numbers. That led him to use mathematical tools to separate evolutionary adaption theories based on selection from those based on constraints that may have been holding back other adaptations. And that led him to human ovaries, or more specifically, to the number of ovarian follicles.

Ovarian follicles are spherical aggregations of cells found inside of the ovaries—they secrete hormones that control the phases of the menstrual cycle. By the time they reach puberty, most girls have between 200,000 and 300,000 follicles—each with the potential of releasing an egg cell.

González-Forero noted that as humans evolved, the energy needed to maintain those follicles was reduced. And because humans still ate as much as they ever did, that freed up the energy for use as a resource by other body parts such as the brain.

In doing the math, González-Forero found that the amount of energy freed up from follicular maintenance roughly equaled the amount of energy increase needed for the human brain to grow to its current size. In his view, the brain was always ready to grow; it was simply held back by a lack of energy.

Journal information: Nature Human Behaviour

© 2024 Science X Network

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Study  ›   Postgraduate Taught courses

Human evolution msc.

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A Master of Science (MSc) is a master’s degree awarded for a postgraduate programme in the sciences.

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It has taken 7 million years of struggle to make us ‘human.’ How did we get here and why? In our Human Evolution MSc you'll investigate the biological and behavioural changes that made us the species we call 'Homo sapiens'.

Introduction

Our MSc offers the unique opportunity to benefit from two institutions specialisms’ as your programme will be delivered by University of Liverpool and Liverpool John Moores University in collaboration.

Liverpool John Moores University will help you gain expertise in the human fossil record, ancient DNA / proteomics and Neanderthal archaeology / spatial analysis. You will benefit from dedicated laboratory facilities for osteological analyses and practical field training in the excavation and recording of human skeletal remains. Liverpool John Moores University’s collaboration with The Poulton Trust will provide you with access to archaeological sites with burials and large skeletal collections for practical training.

University of Liverpool will provide you with expertise in the early archaeological records of Africa and Eurasia, archaeological and evolutionary theory, as well as ecological, environmental, and climate change modelling. We have dedicated facilities and support staff for undertaking materials analysis linked to experimental archaeology and 3D modelling. The Professor Elizabeth Slater Laboratories for Archaeological Science provide analytical tools including scanning electron microscopy [SEM-EDX], a visualisation suite for 3D modelling of artefacts, and microscopes for use-wear analysis of stone tools.

Through the research-led teaching on our MSc you will be fully involved in the human evolution research community, and will learn about the latest theoretical orientations, methods, and discoveries.

Please note this programme is subject to final approval. 

Who is this course for?

This MSc is for graduates who have an undergraduate degree in Archaeology, Anthropology, Biology, or other related discipline and want to further investigate the biological and behavioural changes that made us Homo sapiens . Past practical experience will also be considered in lieu of achieving the required undergraduate degree (or grade) on a case-by-case basis.

What you'll learn

• Advanced practical and theoretical experience in the methods and practice of human evolution research
• Hands-on training in archaeological fieldwork, including excavation of human remains
• Knowledge of the human fossil record, ancient DNA, proteomics, Neanderthal archaeology and spatial analysis
• Insight into the early archaeological records of Africa and Eurasia, archaeological and evolutionary theory, as well as ecological, environmental, and climate change modelling
• To engage independently and critically with a significant body of data on the foundations of human evolutionary studies
• To communicate orally and in written work, and to evaluate critically the work and research of others
• Transferable skills in analysis, computing, and the scientific method which enhance employment prospects
• Knowledge of a wide range of perspectives, cultures, and practices, and benefits of variation and diversity within the human species

Course content

Discover what you'll learn, what you'll study, and how you'll be taught and assessed.

Studying this course part-time

International students may be able to study this course on a part-time basis but this is dependent on visa regulations. Please visit the Government website for more information about student visas .

If you're able to study part-time, you'll study the same modules as the full-time master's degree over a longer period, usually 24 months. You can make studying work for you by arranging your personal schedule around lectures and seminars which take place during the day. After you complete all the taught modules, you will complete your final dissertation or project and will celebrate your achievements at graduation the following term.

Studying part-time means you can study alongside work or any other life commitments. You will study the same modules as the full-time master's degree over a longer period, usually 24 months. You can make studying work for you by arranging your personal schedule around lectures and seminars which take place during the day. After you complete all the taught modules, you will complete your final dissertation or project and will celebrate your achievements at graduation the following term.

Semester one

You will take 60 credits of required modules in semester one.

Compulsory modules

Credits: 15 / semester: semester 1.

In this module students will learn to identify and describe the human skeleton, become familiar with animal bones and learn how to differentiate between the two. Practical and ethical considerations of the curation of human skeletal collections will be considered. Issues in working with commingled remains and identifying skeletal pathologies will also be considered

We live in a time of unprecedented technological change. As a species we are reliant on technological solutions to many of the world’s problems, including those created by technology such as climate change. This module provides the deep time context for understanding how we came to be so dependent on the things we make. We will examine the archaeological evidence for early technologies based on stone, bone and wood. And we will consider the social processes in learning to be a toolmaker.

You will learn to make some simple stone tools and to analyse the tools in terms of the planning and knowledge of the materials involved. Basic descriptive statistics forms part of your practical skills learning. You will use these skills in the main assessment which is a written comparison of the tools you and your classmates have created. We conclude with a consideration of the broad sweep of general purpose technologies that are the foundations of our world.

Humans are perhaps the most behaviourally variable species on the planet; we are also, like all other species, a product of evolution by natural selection. This module will link human variation and adaptation by recourse to the fundamental tenets of evolutionary theory, and will examine how the major processes of evolution (mutation, selection, migration, and drift) are reflected in both the biological and cultural characteristics of our species. Lectures will establish key theoretical principles, and seminars will guide students through individual case studies on aspects of hominin and human biological and cultural adaptation. In doing so, the module will examine how our ancestors have been shaped by evolutionary processes, as well as investigating the role of natural selection in the future of our species.

The module will cover the key issues and topics in palaeoanthropology, ranging from the origins of the earliest hominins to modern humans, the biomechanics of bipedalism, and our distinct growth pattern and life-history.

Semester two

You will take 45 credits of required modules and 15 credits of optional modules in semester two.

Ancient DNA is an extremely powerful tool for understanding the population history of our species. Recent methodological advances have led to a rapid expansion of the field and to its establishment as a vital component to other bioarchaeological methods for analysing ancient human remains. In this module, students will acquire critical knowledge about the main ancient DNA findings which have emerged in the last decade. Emphasis will be given to the acquisition of computational skills for the analysis of genetic data which are in high demand in both academic and industrial settings, therefore increasing the students’ future job prospects.

Credits: 15 / Semester: semester 2

This module is compulsory for LJMU Bioarchaeology and LJMU/UoL Human Evolution MSc students. For the Bioarchaeology and Human Evoloution students, the module is well integrated with the other modules on the programme.

The aim of this module is to provide extensive training in generic research knowledge and statistical techniques for the Natural Sciences. It will provide the student with a broad appreciation of research methods and methodology including an understanding of the uses and limitations of different research methods. It will teach the students how to design and execute a research project keeping in mind feasibility, ethics, data protection, and project logistics and funding. In addition, attention will be given to dissemination to both academic and non-academic audiences: from writing academic manuscripts to creating blogs and speaking to the media. Univariate and multivariate statistics will be taught by lectures and online exercises, and students will be introduced to statistical software packages such as SPSS and R.

Optional modules

In the last 15 years, specialists have largely agreed that the defining characteristic of the behavioural abilities of modern humans is the ability to use symbolism defined as the use of one thing – such as a word, an object, a colour, or an image – to make reference to another. The recognition and identification of symbols and the interpretation of symbolic behaviour through the archaeological record, however, is considerably harder to prove than say, especially in the context of the first possible evidence. There are significant problems in knowing what early symbols and symbolic behaviour might look like, the contexts in which it might operate and the advantages, if any, of its use as individuals living within cultures that are full of symbols and symbolic activity, and have been this way for tens of thousands of years. This module addresses three key aspects of symbolic activity in the context of human evolution. The first aspect relates to the identification of a symbolic and materially embodied behaviour as a distinctive and new element of anatomically modern humans and the inferred advantages that this capacity conveyed over hominins that did not possess it. The second looks at the evidence for the first material culture that is unambiguously identified as symbolic and the context of its interpretation. The third looks at evidence for more complex information recorded or presented symbolically, and the manner in which we can ‘read’ and unambiguously interpret these artefacts. As part of this process we shall also explore the various different ways in which symbolism, art, design, and communication have been given shape through academic language through the anthropological, art historical and psychological literature.

This module provides advanced training in the identification of teeth. It will also cover topics that will allow the student to determine origins, phylogenetic affinities, diet, and many other facets of life experience and population structure from human and primate teeth.

Final Project

You will undertake your dissertation over the summer vacation period.

Credits: 60 / Semester: summer

ALGY600 provides the framework for MA students, in the Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology, to undertake independent guided research on a scholarly topic of relevance in the discipline of their choice. This substantial piece of work is developed and written up over the course of the M-level study in conjunction with the ‘taught’ component of the programme.

How you'll learn

Your modules will be delivered through a combination of formal lectures, student-led seminars and extensive practical and workshop instruction. The focus will be on research-led teaching, and you will be offered practical classes in numerous sub-fields

The modules are designed to guide you to identify your own learning needs and the resources to address them. This will go on to prepare you for your research project, including planning of research, research design, time management, ethics, and health and safety.

How you're assessed

The MSc in Human Evolution uses a wide range of assessment methods, including coursework (critiques, reports, research design, professional reports, and essays), tests, and oral presentations (group and individual).

Assessment elements are regularly structured for you to benefit from the feedback that they provide. Formative assessments include bi-weekly quizzes embedded in the first semester module Advanced Osteology and Skeletal Pathology, to help you transition from undergraduate to postgraduate learning.

The MSc focuses on authentic assessment via tasks such as fieldwork and lithic reports. Through studying the diversity of human societies, you will develop a truly global perspective.

Liverpool Hallmarks

We have a distinctive approach to education, the Liverpool Curriculum Framework, which focuses on research-connected teaching, active learning, and authentic assessment to ensure our students graduate as digitally fluent and confident global citizens.

Learn more about our Liverpool hallmarks.

Our curriculum

The Liverpool Curriculum framework sets out our distinctive approach to education. Our teaching staff support our students to develop academic knowledge, skills, and understanding alongside our graduate attributes :

• Digital fluency
• Global citizenship

Our curriculum is characterised by the three Liverpool Hallmarks :

• Research-connected teaching
• Active learning
• Authentic assessment

All this is underpinned by our core value of inclusivity and commitment to providing a curriculum that is accessible to all students.

Your experience

The  Department of Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology  is part of the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures. Teaching takes place across campus, including in specialist facilities in the Central Teaching Hub and Garstang Museum of Archaeology.

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Supporting your learning.

From arrival to alumni, we’re with you all the way:

• Careers and employability support , including help with career planning, understanding the job market and strengthening your networking skills
• A dedicated student services team can help you get assistance with your studies, help with health and wellbeing, and access to financial advice
• Confidential counselling and support to help students with personal problems affecting their studies and general wellbeing
• Support for students with differing needs from the Disability advice and guidance team . They can identify and recommend appropriate support provisions for you.

Why Archaeology, Classics and Egyptology at University of Liverpool?

• Fantastic on-campus facilities such as the Garstang Museum with its outstanding archaeological collections and GIS suite for archaeological drawing
• Our extensive laboratories used for conservation, lithics, geomagnetism, stable isotope, trace elements, finds processing and sample preparation
• An enviable library which has been built up since the Ancient World and Archaeology has been studied at Liverpool since the 1880s
• Opportunities to learn ancient languages such as Greek, Latin, Akkadian, Sumerian, Egyptian and Coptic
• Archaeological projects based internationally, in Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Jordan, Turkey, Italy, Zambia, Kenya, Ethiopia and South Africa, as well as in the British Isles

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Careers and employability

Our MSc in Human Evolution will offer you the opportunity to learn a set of scientific skills useful in future careers in academia, in the private sector, or in associated scientific or heritage industries.

The core module, Research Methods, includes employability-focused topics such as; CV writing and applying for jobs, project logistics, communicating your work outside academia, creating websites, use of social media and grant applications.

All students will have their own personal supervisor, allowing for targeted conversations about research (e.g. dissertation research) and future employment.

Our Human Evolution MSc will help you to develop a skill set including data collection and statistical analysis, scientific writing, public presentations, and working as a team, which will be valuable for many careers.

Career support from day one to graduation and beyond

Career planning.

Our Careers Studio and career coaches can provide tailored support for your future plans.

From education to employment

Employability in your curriculum for a successful transition

Networking events

Make meaningful connections with like-minded professionals

Our campus Career Studio is a space for students and graduates to drop into and talk to a career coach. Career coaches are highly trained to help no matter what stage you are at in your career planning. You can access support to find and apply for full-time and part-time roles, placements, internships and graduate schemes. You will also find the help you need if you have a start-up idea or want to create a business plan. You can explore the world of work, prepare for job interviews, and access careers events and workshops. The Career Studio is open Monday to Friday from 10am-5pm, simply drop in at a time that works for you.

We develop our programmes with employers in mind. You will be supported to enhance your long-term employment prospects as you learn. We do this by exposing you to professionals, a variety of sectors and supporting you to work collaboratively with others to develop transferable skills. You are equipped with a clearer view of what to focus on in your area of interest, and to reflect on your studies. Our digital employability tools give you a tech-enhanced curriculum experience and make it easy for you to prepare for the world of work. You can use tools like the Handshake platform to connect with employers and message the Career Studio 24/7.

You can start building good professional networks by attending events and employability activities. Our events are designed to develop your skills and expose you to many different employers, as well as to help you make contacts in your field. We help you improve your confidence when speaking to employers and give you access to unique opportunities. Our networking events also boost your understanding of the competencies and skills that employers are looking for in their recruitment process, giving you a competitive edge.

Your future

With an MSc in Human Evolution, you may choose to go on to a PhD programme in a more specific area of the Life Sciences, or pursue a career in the following areas:

• natural and social sciences
• cognition and psychology
• forensic science
• archaeological science
• primatology
• animal husbandry
• veterinary science
• museum management
• academic research

You will also be eligible to gain employment in:

• the civil service
• science communication and science policy through governmental and non-governmental organisations, including journalism
• field and laboratory science-related roles across a range of employment sectors.

Fees and funding

Your tuition fees, funding your studies, and other costs to consider.

Tuition fees

Tuition fees cover the cost of your teaching and assessment, operating facilities such as libraries, IT equipment, and access to academic and personal support.

• You can pay your tuition fees in instalments .
• All or part of your tuition fees can be funded by external sponsorship .
• International applicants who accept an offer of a place will need to pay a tuition fee deposit .

If you're a UK national, or have settled status in the UK, you may be eligible to apply for a Postgraduate Loan worth up to £12,167 to help with course fees and living costs. Learn more about paying for your studies. .

Additional costs

We understand that budgeting for your time at university is important, and we want to make sure you understand any course-related costs that are not covered by your tuition fee. This could include buying a laptop, books, or stationery.

Find out more about the additional study costs that may apply to this course.

Additional study costs

Find out more about additional study costs.

Scholarships and bursaries

We offer a range of scholarships and bursaries that could help pay your tuition and living expenses.

Select your country or region for more scholarships and bursaries.

ANID Chile Scholarship

If you’re a Chilean student joining a master’s degree, you could be eligible to apply for a 20% discount on your tuition fees with an ANID Chile Scholarship.

Chevening Scholarships

If you’re an international student from an eligible country, joining a one-year master’s course, you could apply to have your master’s fees paid, up to a maximum of £18,000, and receive additional help with living costs.

CONACYT Award

If you’re a Mexican student joining a master’s degree, you could be eligible to apply for a 30% discount on your tuition fees with a CONACYT Award.

FIDERH Award

If you’re a Mexican student joining a master’s degree and you’re in receipt of a FIDERH graduate loan, you could benefit from a 20% discount on your tuition fees with a FIDERH Award.

Fulbright Scholarship

If you’re a USA student joining a master’s degree, you can apply to be considered for a tuition fee discount of £20,000 with a Fulright Scholarship. One Fulbright Scholarship for master’s study is available in each academic year.

FUNED Awards

If you’re a Mexican student joining a master’s degree and you’re in receipt of a FUNED loan, you can apply to be considered for a 20% tuition fee discount. A total of up to ten awards will be available to master’s and PhD students per academic year.

Graduate Association Hong Kong & Tung Postgraduate Scholarships

If you’re a master’s student from Hong Kong or the People’s Republic of China who can demonstrate academic excellence, you may be eligible to apply for a scholarship worth up to £10,000 in partnership with the Tung Foundation.

HLC Scholarships for Postgraduate Study

• Home and international students

Are you a UK student joining a master’s course in the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures? You could be eligible to apply for a fee discount of £2,000. Four awards will be available in each academic year.

history-cultural-history-ma

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international-slavery-studies-ma

media-and-politics-ma

political-science-and-international-relations-ma

classics-and-ancient-history-ma

egyptology-ma

archaeology-ma

archives-and-records-management-digital-pathway-marm

archives-and-records-management-international-pathway-marmi

archives-and-records-management-marm

art-philosophy-and-cultural-institutions-ma

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philosophy-ma

philosophy-mres

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spanish-studies-modern-languages-and-cultures-mres

translation-studies-modern-languages-and-cultures-mres

archaeology-mres

archaeology-msc

egyptology-mres

archives-mres

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classics-and-ancient-history-mres

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history-twentieth-century-history-ma

health-cultures-and-societies-ma

international-relations-and-security-ma

international-relations-and-security-mres

palaeoanthropology-mres

palaeoanthropology-msc

film-studies-modern-languages-and-cultures-mres

translation-ma

film-studies-ma

human-evolution-msc

HRH Princess Sirindhorn University of Liverpool Scholarship (Thailand)

If you’re a student from Thailand joining a one-year master’s degree, you might be eligible to apply to have your tuition fees paid in full and receive help with living costs. One award is available and only students who are new to the University will be considered.

JuventudEsGto Scholarship

If you’re a resident of the state of Guanajuato in Mexico joining a master’s degree, you could be eligible for a 10% discount on your tuition fees with a JuventudEsGto Scholarship.

Marshall Scholarship

If you’re a USA student joining an eligible master’s with us, you could apply to be considered for a Marshall Scholarship. If your application is successful, your master’s tuition fees will be paid in full. One Marshall Scholarship for master’s study is available in each academic year.

Postgraduate Opportunity Bursary

• Home students

If you’re a UK University of Liverpool graduate joining a master’s degree with us, you could be eligible to receive £3,000 off your tuition fees. You must have graduated in the last two years and received a widening access scholarship during your undergraduate studies.

Turkish Ministry of Education Scholarship

If you’re a Turkish student joining a master’s degree, you could be eligible to apply for a 20% discount on your tuition fees with a Turkish Ministry of Education Scholarship.

Humanitarian Scholarships for Master’s Programmes

Do you have recognised status as a refugee or person with humanitarian protection outside the UK? Or are you a Ukrainian who’s sought temporary protection in the EU? You could be eligible to apply for the full payment of your master’s fees and additional financial support.

University of Liverpool International College Excellence Scholarship

Completed a Pre-Master’s at University of Liverpool International College (UoLIC)? We’re offering a £5,000 fee discount off the first year of master’s study to some of the highest achieving students joining one of our non-clinical master’s courses from UoLIC.

University of Liverpool International College Impact Progression Scholarships

If you’re a University of Liverpool International College student awarded a Kaplan Impact Scholarship, we’ll also consider you for an Impact Progression Scholarship. If selected, you’ll receive a fee discount worth £3,000 off the first year of your master’s course.

Vice-Chancellor’s International Attainment Scholarship for Mainland China

Are you a high-achieving graduate from the People’s Republic of China with a degree from a Chinese university? You could be eligible to apply for a £5,000 fee discount if you’re joining an eligible master’s course. Up to 15 eligible students will receive this scholarship.

Entry requirements

The qualifications and exam results you'll need to apply for this course.

English language requirements

You'll need to demonstrate competence in the use of English language, unless you’re from a majority English speaking country .

We accept a variety of international language tests and country-specific qualifications .

You'll need to demonstrate competence in the use of English language, unless you’re from a majority English speaking country.

We accept a variety of international language tests and country-specific qualifications.

International applicants who do not meet the minimum required standard of English language can complete one of our Pre-Sessional English courses to achieve the required level.

You'll need to demonstrate competence in the use of English language, unless you’re from a majority English speaking country

PRE-SESSIONAL ENGLISH

Do you need to complete a Pre-Sessional English course to meet the English language requirements for this course?

The length of Pre-Sessional English course you’ll need to take depends on your current level of English language ability.

Find out the length of Pre-Sessional English course you may require for this degree.

Pre-sessional English

If you don’t meet our English language requirements, we can use your most recent IELTS score, or the equivalent score in selected other English language tests , to determine the length of Pre-Sessional English course you require.

Use the table below to check the course length you're likely to require for your current English language ability and see whether the course is available on campus or online.

If you’ve completed an alternative English language test to IELTS, we may be able to use this to assess your English language ability and determine the Pre-Sessional English course length you require.

Please see our guide to Pre-Sessional English entry requirements for IELTS 6.5, with no component below 6.0, for further details.

About our entry requirements

Our entry requirements may change from time to time both according to national application trends and the availability of places at Liverpool for particular courses. We review our requirements before the start of the new application cycle each year and publish any changes on our website so that applicants are aware of our typical entry requirements before they submit their application.

We believe in treating applicants as individuals, and in making offers that are appropriate to their personal circumstances and background. Therefore the offer any individual applicant receives may differ slightly from the typical offer quoted on the website.

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Discover more about the city and University.

Why Liverpool?

Liverpool bursts with diversity and creativity which makes it ideal for you to undertake your postgraduate studies and access various opportunities for you and your family.

Accommodation

To fully immerse yourself in the university experience living in halls will keep you close to campus where you can always meet new people. Find your home away from home.

Fees and Finance

Discover what expenses are covered by the cost of your tuition fees and other finance-related information you may need regarding your studies at Liverpool.

Have a question about this course or studying with us? Our dedicated enquiries team can help.

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• Professor Larry Barham

Last updated 20 May 2024 / See what's changed / Programme terms and conditions

Changes to Human Evolution MSc

See what updates we've made to this course since it was published. We document changes to information such as course content, entry requirements and how you'll be taught.

• Support Our Work

The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program

Homo sapiens.

The species that you and all other living human beings on this planet belong to is Homo sapiens . During a time of dramatic climate change 300,000 years ago, Homo sapiens evolved in Africa. Like other early humans that were living at this time, they gathered and hunted food, and evolved behaviors that helped them respond to the challenges of survival in unstable environments.

Anatomically, modern humans can generally be characterized by the lighter build of their skeletons compared to earlier humans. Modern humans have very large brains, which vary in size from population to population and between males and females, but the average size is approximately 1300 cubic centimeters. Housing this big  brain involved the reorganization of the skull into what is thought of as "modern" -- a thin-walled, high vaulted skull with a flat and near vertical forehead. Modern human faces also show much less (if any) of the heavy brow ridges and prognathism of other early humans. Our jaws are also less heavily developed, with smaller teeth.

Scientists sometimes use the term “anatomically modern Homo sapiens” to refer to members of our own species who lived during prehistoric times.

History of Discovery:

Unlike every other human species, Homo sapiens does not have a true type specimen. In other words, there is not a particular Homo sapiens individual that researchers recognize as being the specimen that gave Homo sapiens its name. Even though Linnaeus first described our species in 1758, it was not customary at that time to designate type specimens. It is rumored that in 1994 paleontologist Robert Bakker formally declared the skull of Edward Drinker Cope as the “lectotype”, a specimen essentially serving as the type specimen. When Cope, himself a great paleontologist, died in 1897, he willed his remains to science, and they are held by the University of Pennsylvania. But a type specimen must be one examined by the original author who names a species, so Cope’s remains do not qualify.

How They Survived:

Prehistoric Homo sapiens not only made and used stone tools, they also specialized them and made a variety of smaller, more complex, refined and specialized tools including composite stone tools, fishhooks and harpoons, bows and arrows, spear throwers and sewing needles.

For millions of years all humans, early and modern alike, had to find their own food. They spent a large part of each day gathering plants and hunting or scavenging animals. By 164,000 years ago modern humans were collecting and cooking shellfish and by 90,000 years ago modern humans had begun making special fishing tools. Then, within just the past 12,000 years, our species, Homo sapiens , made the transition to producing food and changing our surroundings. Humans found they could control the growth and breeding of certain plants and animals. This discovery led to farming and herding animals, activities that transformed Earth’s natural landscapes—first locally, then globally. As humans invested more time in producing food, they settled down. Villages became towns, and towns became cities. With more food available, the human population began to increase dramatically. Our species had been so successful that it has inadvertently created a turning point in the history of life on Earth.

Modern humans evolved a unique combination of physical and behavioral characteristics, many of which other early human species also possessed, though not to the same degree. The complex brains of modern humans enabled them to interact with each other and with their surroundings in new and different ways. As the environment became more unpredictable, bigger brains helped our ancestors survive. They made specialized tools, and use tools to make other tools, as described above; they ate a variety of animal and plant foods; they had control over fire; they lived in shelters; they built broad social networks, sometimes including people they have never even met; they exchanged resources over wide areas; and they created art, music, personal adornment, rituals, and a complex symbolic world. Modern humans have spread to every continent and vastly expanded their numbers. They have altered the world in ways that benefit them greatly. But this transformation has unintended consequences for other species as well as for ourselves, creating new survival challenges.

Evolutionary Tree Information:

Fossils and DNA confirm humans are one of more than 200 species belonging to the order of Primates. Within that larger group, humans are nested within the great ape family. Although we did not evolve from any of the apes living today, we share characteristics with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans (the great apes), as well as other apes. We most likely evolved from Homo heidelbergensis , the common ancestor we share with Neanderthals, who are our closest extinct relatives.

We don’t know everything about our own species—but we keep learning more! Through studies of fossils, genetics, behavior, and biology of modern humans, we continue to learn more about who we are.

Below are some of the still unanswered questions about  Homo sapiens  that may be answered with future discoveries:

• Who was our direct evolutionary ancestor? Was it Homo heidelbergensis, like many paleoanthropologists think, or another species?
• How much interbreeding occured between our species and  Homo neanderthalensis?
• What does the future hold for our species in an evolutionary sense? 

References:

Recommended readings:

McBrearty, S., Brooks, A., 2000. The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern humans. Journal of Human Evolution 39, 453-563.

Henshilwood, C.S., Marean, C.W., 2003. The origin of modern human behavior: critique of the models and their test implications. Current Anthropology 44, 627-651.

Ngaloba LH 18

Skhūl V was recovered from the Skhūl Cave near Mount Carmel, Israel, along with the skeletons of nine other adults and children. Some anatomical features, like the brow ridges and occipital bun of the male Skhūl V skull are reminiscent of earlier humans; however, Skhūl V also has the high, vertical forehead and rounded skull typical of modern human skulls.

Cro-Magnon 1

Cro-Magnon 1 is a middle-aged, male skeleton of one of the first modern human fossils ever found, at Cro-Magnon, France in 1868. Scientists estimate his age at death at less than 50 years old. Except for the teeth, his skull is complete, though the bones in his face are noticeably pitted from a fungal infection.

Lapa Vermelha IV Hominid 1

• Climate Effects on Human Evolution
• Survival of the Adaptable
• Human Evolution Timeline Interactive
• 2011 Olorgesailie Dispatches
• 2004 Olorgesailie Dispatches
• 1999 Olorgesailie Dispatches
• Olorgesailie Drilling Project
• Kanam, Kenya
• Kanjera, Kenya
• Ol Pejeta, Kenya
• Olorgesailie, Kenya
• Evolution of Human Innovation
• Adventures in the Rift Valley: Interactive
• 'Hobbits' on Flores, Indonesia
• Earliest Humans in China
• Bose, China
• Anthropocene: The Age of Humans
• Fossil Forensics: Interactive
• What's Hot in Human Origins?
• Instructions
• Carnivore Dentition
• Ungulate Dentition
• Primate Behavior
• Footprints from Koobi Fora, Kenya
• Laetoli Footprint Trails
• Footprints from Engare Sero, Tanzania
• Hammerstone from Majuangou, China
• Handaxe and Tektites from Bose, China
• Handaxe from Europe
• Handaxe from India
• Oldowan Tools from Lokalalei, Kenya
• Olduvai Chopper
• Stone Tools from Majuangou, China
• Middle Stone Age Tools
• Burin from Laugerie Haute & Basse, Dordogne, France
• La Madeleine, Dordogne, France
• Butchered Animal Bones from Gona, Ethiopia
• Katanda Bone Harpoon Point
• Oldest Wooden Spear
• Punctured Horse Shoulder Blade
• Stone Sickle Blades
• Projectile Point
• Oldest Pottery
• Pottery Fragment
• Fire-Altered Stone Tools
• Terra Amata Shelter
• Qafzeh: Oldest Intentional Burial
• Assyrian Cylinder Seal
• Blombos Ocher Plaque
• Ishango Bone
• Bone and Ivory Needles
• Carved Ivory Running Lion
• Female torso in ivory
• Ivory Horse Figurine
• Ivory Horse Sculpture
• Lady of Brassempouy
• Lion-Man Figurine
• Willendorf Venus
• Ancient Shell Beads
• Carved Bone Disc
• Cro-Magnon Shell Bead Necklace
• Oldest Known Shell Beads
• Ancient Flute
• Ancient Pigments
• Apollo 11 Plaque
• Carved antler baton with horses
• Geometric incised bone rectangle
• Tata Plaque
• Mystery Skull Interactive
• Shanidar 3 - Neanderthal Skeleton
• One Species, Living Worldwide
• Human Skin Color Variation
• Ancient DNA and Neanderthals
• Human Family Tree
• Swartkrans, South Africa
• Shanidar, Iraq
• Walking Upright
• Tools & Food
• Social Life
• Language & Symbols
• Humans Change the World
• Introduction to Human Evolution
• Nuts and bolts classification: Arbitrary or not? (Grades 6-8)
• Comparison of Human and Chimp Chromosomes (Grades 9-12)
• Hominid Cranial Comparison: The "Skulls" Lab (Grades 9-12)
• Investigating Common Descent: Formulating Explanations and Models (Grades 9-12)
• Fossil and Migration Patterns in Early Hominids (Grades 9-12)
• For College Students
• Why do we get goose bumps?
• Chickens, chimpanzees, and you - what do they have in common?
• Grandparents are unique to humans
• How strong are we?
• Humans are handy!
• Humans: the running ape
• Our big hungry brain!
• Our eyes say it!
• The early human tool kit
• The short-haired human!
• The “Nutcracker”
• What can lice tell us about human evolution?
• What does gut got to do with it?
• Why do paleoanthropologists love Lucy?
• Why do we have wisdom teeth?
• Human Origins Glossary
• Teaching Evolution through Human Examples
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Recommended Books
• Exhibit Floorplan Interactive
• Print Floorplan PDF
• Reconstructions of Early Humans
• Chesterfield County Public Library
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• Otis Library
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• Human Origins Do it Yourself Exhibit
• Exhibit Field Trip Guide
• Acknowledgments
• Human Origins Program Team
• Connie Bertka
• Betty Holley
• Nancy Howell
• Lee Meadows
• Jamie L. Jensen
• David Orenstein
• Michael Tenneson
• Leonisa Ardizzone
• David Haberman
• Fred Edwords (Emeritus)
• Elliot Dorff (Emeritus)
• Francisca Cho (Emeritus)
• Peter F. Ryan (Emeritus)
• Mustansir Mir (Emeritus)
• Randy Isaac (Emeritus)
• Mary Evelyn Tucker (Emeritus)
• Wentzel van Huyssteen (Emeritus)
• Joe Watkins (Emeritus)
• Tom Weinandy (Emeritus)
• Members Thoughts on Science, Religion & Human Origins (video)
• Science, Religion, Evolution and Creationism: Primer
• The Evolution of Religious Belief: Seeking Deep Evolutionary Roots
• Laboring for Science, Laboring for Souls:  Obstacles and Approaches to Teaching and Learning Evolution in the Southeastern United States
• Public Event : Religious Audiences and the Topic of Evolution: Lessons from the Classroom (video)
• Evolution and the Anthropocene: Science, Religion, and the Human Future
• Imagining the Human Future: Ethics for the Anthropocene
• Human Evolution and Religion: Questions and Conversations from the Hall of Human Origins
• I Came from Where? Approaching the Science of Human Origins from Religious Perspectives
• Religious Perspectives on the Science of Human Origins
• Submit Your Response to "What Does It Mean To Be Human?"
• Volunteer Opportunities
• Submit Question
• "Shaping Humanity: How Science, Art, and Imagination Help Us Understand Our Origins" (book by John Gurche)
• What Does It Mean To Be Human? (book by Richard Potts and Chris Sloan)
• Bronze Statues
• Reconstructed Faces

A new future of work: The race to deploy AI and raise skills in Europe and beyond

At a glance.

Amid tightening labor markets and a slowdown in productivity growth, Europe and the United States face shifts in labor demand, spurred by AI and automation. Our updated modeling of the future of work finds that demand for workers in STEM-related, healthcare, and other high-skill professions would rise, while demand for occupations such as office workers, production workers, and customer service representatives would decline. By 2030, in a midpoint adoption scenario, up to 30 percent of current hours worked could be automated, accelerated by generative AI (gen AI). Efforts to achieve net-zero emissions, an aging workforce, and growth in e-commerce, as well as infrastructure and technology spending and overall economic growth, could also shift employment demand.

By 2030, Europe could require up to 12 million occupational transitions, double the prepandemic pace. In the United States, required transitions could reach almost 12 million, in line with the prepandemic norm. Both regions navigated even higher levels of labor market shifts at the height of the COVID-19 period, suggesting that they can handle this scale of future job transitions. The pace of occupational change is broadly similar among countries in Europe, although the specific mix reflects their economic variations.

Businesses will need a major skills upgrade. Demand for technological and social and emotional skills could rise as demand for physical and manual and higher cognitive skills stabilizes. Surveyed executives in Europe and the United States expressed a need not only for advanced IT and data analytics but also for critical thinking, creativity, and teaching and training—skills they report as currently being in short supply. Companies plan to focus on retraining workers, more than hiring or subcontracting, to meet skill needs.

Workers with lower wages face challenges of redeployment as demand reweights toward occupations with higher wages in both Europe and the United States. Occupations with lower wages are likely to see reductions in demand, and workers will need to acquire new skills to transition to better-paying work. If that doesn’t happen, there is a risk of a more polarized labor market, with more higher-wage jobs than workers and too many workers for existing lower-wage jobs.

Choices made today could revive productivity growth while creating better societal outcomes. Embracing the path of accelerated technology adoption with proactive worker redeployment could help Europe achieve an annual productivity growth rate of up to 3 percent through 2030. However, slow adoption would limit that to 0.3 percent, closer to today’s level of productivity growth in Western Europe. Slow worker redeployment would leave millions unable to participate productively in the future of work.

Demand will change for a range of occupations through 2030, including growth in STEM- and healthcare-related occupations, among others

This report focuses on labor markets in nine major economies in the European Union along with the United Kingdom, in comparison with the United States. Technology, including most recently the rise of gen AI, along with other factors, will spur changes in the pattern of labor demand through 2030. Our study, which uses an updated version of the McKinsey Global Institute future of work model, seeks to quantify the occupational transitions that will be required and the changing nature of demand for different types of jobs and skills.

Our methodology

We used methodology consistent with other McKinsey Global Institute reports on the future of work to model trends of job changes at the level of occupations, activities, and skills. For this report, we focused our analysis on the 2022–30 period.

Our model estimates net changes in employment demand by sector and occupation; we also estimate occupational transitions, or the net number of workers that need to change in each type of occupation, based on which occupations face declining demand by 2030 relative to current employment in 2022. We included ten countries in Europe: nine EU members—the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, Spain, and Sweden—and the United Kingdom. For the United States, we build on estimates published in our 2023 report Generative AI and the future of work in America.

We included multiple drivers in our modeling: automation potential, net-zero transition, e-commerce growth, remote work adoption, increases in income, aging populations, technology investments, and infrastructure investments.

Two scenarios are used to bookend the work-automation model: “late” and “early.” For Europe, we modeled a “faster” scenario and a “slower” one. For the faster scenario, we use the midpoint—the arithmetical average between our late and early scenarios. For the slower scenario, we use a “mid late” trajectory, an arithmetical average between a late adoption scenario and the midpoint scenario. For the United States, we use the midpoint scenario, based on our earlier research.

We also estimate the productivity effects of automation, using GDP per full-time-equivalent (FTE) employee as the measure of productivity. We assumed that workers displaced by automation rejoin the workforce at 2022 productivity levels, net of automation, and in line with the expected 2030 occupational mix.

Amid tightening labor markets and a slowdown in productivity growth, Europe and the United States face shifts in labor demand, spurred not only by AI and automation but also by other trends, including efforts to achieve net-zero emissions, an aging population, infrastructure spending, technology investments, and growth in e-commerce, among others (see sidebar, “Our methodology”).

Our analysis finds that demand for occupations such as health professionals and other STEM-related professionals would grow by 17 to 30 percent between 2022 and 2030, (Exhibit 1).

By contrast, demand for workers in food services, production work, customer services, sales, and office support—all of which declined over the 2012–22 period—would continue to decline until 2030. These jobs involve a high share of repetitive tasks, data collection, and elementary data processing—all activities that automated systems can handle efficiently.

Up to 30 percent of hours worked could be automated by 2030, boosted by gen AI, leading to millions of required occupational transitions

By 2030, our analysis finds that about 27 percent of current hours worked in Europe and 30 percent of hours worked in the United States could be automated, accelerated by gen AI. Our model suggests that roughly 20 percent of hours worked could still be automated even without gen AI, implying a significant acceleration.

These trends will play out in labor markets in the form of workers needing to change occupations. By 2030, under the faster adoption scenario we modeled, Europe could require up to 12.0 million occupational transitions, affecting 6.5 percent of current employment. That is double the prepandemic pace (Exhibit 2). Under a slower scenario we modeled for Europe, the number of occupational transitions needed would amount to 8.5 million, affecting 4.6 percent of current employment. In the United States, required transitions could reach almost 12.0 million, affecting 7.5 percent of current employment. Unlike Europe, this magnitude of transitions is broadly in line with the prepandemic norm.

Both regions navigated even higher levels of labor market shifts at the height of the COVID-19 period. While these were abrupt and painful to many, given the forced nature of the shifts, the experience suggests that both regions have the ability to handle this scale of future job transitions.

Businesses will need a major skills upgrade

The occupational transitions noted above herald substantial shifts in workforce skills in a future in which automation and AI are integrated into the workplace (Exhibit 3). Workers use multiple skills to perform a given task, but for the purposes of our quantification, we identified the predominant skill used.

Demand for technological skills could see substantial growth in Europe and in the United States (increases of 25 percent and 29 percent, respectively, in hours worked by 2030 compared to 2022) under our midpoint scenario of automation adoption (which is the faster scenario for Europe).

Demand for social and emotional skills could rise by 11 percent in Europe and by 14 percent in the United States. Underlying this increase is higher demand for roles requiring interpersonal empathy and leadership skills. These skills are crucial in healthcare and managerial roles in an evolving economy that demands greater adaptability and flexibility.

Conversely, demand for work in which basic cognitive skills predominate is expected to decline by 14 percent. Basic cognitive skills are required primarily in office support or customer service roles, which are highly susceptible to being automated by AI. Among work characterized by these basic cognitive skills experiencing significant drops in demand are basic data processing and literacy, numeracy, and communication.

Demand for work in which higher cognitive skills predominate could also decline slightly, according to our analysis. While creativity is expected to remain highly sought after, with a potential increase of 12 percent by 2030, work activities characterized by other advanced cognitive skills such as advanced literacy and writing, along with quantitative and statistical skills, could decline by 19 percent.

Demand for physical and manual skills, on the other hand, could remain roughly level with the present. These skills remain the largest share of workforce skills, representing about 30 percent of total hours worked in 2022. Growth in demand for these skills between 2022 and 2030 could come from the build-out of infrastructure and higher investment in low-emissions sectors, while declines would be in line with continued automation in production work.

Business executives report skills shortages today and expect them to worsen

A survey we conducted of C-suite executives in five countries shows that companies are already grappling with skills challenges, including a skills mismatch, particularly in technological, higher cognitive, and social and emotional skills: about one-third of the more than 1,100 respondents report a shortfall in these critical areas. At the same time, a notable number of executives say they have enough employees with basic cognitive skills and, to a lesser extent, physical and manual skills.

Within technological skills, companies in our survey reported that their most significant shortages are in advanced IT skills and programming, advanced data analysis, and mathematical skills. Among higher cognitive skills, significant shortfalls are seen in critical thinking and problem structuring and in complex information processing. About 40 percent of the executives surveyed pointed to a shortage of workers with these skills, which are needed for working alongside new technologies (Exhibit 4).

Companies see retraining as key to acquiring needed skills and adapting to the new work landscape

Surveyed executives expect significant changes to their workforce skill levels and worry about not finding the right skills by 2030. More than one in four survey respondents said that failing to capture the needed skills could directly harm financial performance and indirectly impede their efforts to leverage the value from AI.

To acquire the skills they need, companies have three main options: retraining, hiring, and contracting workers. Our survey suggests that executives are looking at all three options, with retraining the most widely reported tactic planned to address the skills mismatch: on average, out of companies that mentioned retraining as one of their tactics to address skills mismatch, executives said they would retrain 32 percent of their workforce. The scale of retraining needs varies in degree. For example, respondents in the automotive industry expect 36 percent of their workforce to be retrained, compared with 28 percent in the financial services industry. Out of those who have mentioned hiring or contracting as their tactics to address the skills mismatch, executives surveyed said they would hire an average of 23 percent of their workforce and contract an average of 18 percent.

Occupational transitions will affect high-, medium-, and low-wage workers differently

All ten European countries we examined for this report may see increasing demand for top-earning occupations. By contrast, workers in the two lowest-wage-bracket occupations could be three to five times more likely to have to change occupations compared to the top wage earners, our analysis finds. The disparity is much higher in the United States, where workers in the two lowest-wage-bracket occupations are up to 14 times more likely to face occupational shifts than the highest earners. In Europe, the middle-wage population could be twice as affected by occupational transitions as the same population in United States, representing 7.3 percent of the working population who might face occupational transitions.

Enhancing human capital at the same time as deploying the technology rapidly could boost annual productivity growth

About quantumblack, ai by mckinsey.

QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, helps companies transform using the power of technology, technical expertise, and industry experts. With thousands of practitioners at QuantumBlack (data engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, and software engineers) and McKinsey (industry and domain experts), we are working to solve the world’s most important AI challenges. QuantumBlack Labs is our center of technology development and client innovation, which has been driving cutting-edge advancements and developments in AI through locations across the globe.

Organizations and policy makers have choices to make; the way they approach AI and automation, along with human capital augmentation, will affect economic and societal outcomes.

We have attempted to quantify at a high level the potential effects of different stances to AI deployment on productivity in Europe. Our analysis considers two dimensions. The first is the adoption rate of AI and automation technologies. We consider the faster scenario and the late scenario for technology adoption. Faster adoption would unlock greater productivity growth potential but also, potentially, more short-term labor disruption than the late scenario.

The second dimension we consider is the level of automated worker time that is redeployed into the economy. This represents the ability to redeploy the time gained by automation and productivity gains (for example, new tasks and job creation). This could vary depending on the success of worker training programs and strategies to match demand and supply in labor markets.

We based our analysis on two potential scenarios: either all displaced workers would be able to fully rejoin the economy at a similar productivity level as in 2022 or only some 80 percent of the automated workers’ time will be redeployed into the economy.

Exhibit 5 illustrates the various outcomes in terms of annual productivity growth rate. The top-right quadrant illustrates the highest economy-wide productivity, with an annual productivity growth rate of up to 3.1 percent. It requires fast adoption of technologies as well as full redeployment of displaced workers. The top-left quadrant also demonstrates technology adoption on a fast trajectory and shows a relatively high productivity growth rate (up to 2.5 percent). However, about 6.0 percent of total hours worked (equivalent to 10.2 million people not working) would not be redeployed in the economy. Finally, the two bottom quadrants depict the failure to adopt AI and automation, leading to limited productivity gains and translating into limited labor market disruptions.

Four priorities for companies

The adoption of automation technologies will be decisive in protecting businesses’ competitive advantage in an automation and AI era. To ensure successful deployment at a company level, business leaders can embrace four priorities.

Understand the potential. Leaders need to understand the potential of these technologies, notably including how AI and gen AI can augment and automate work. This includes estimating both the total capacity that these technologies could free up and their impact on role composition and skills requirements. Understanding this allows business leaders to frame their end-to-end strategy and adoption goals with regard to these technologies.

Plan a strategic workforce shift. Once they understand the potential of automation technologies, leaders need to plan the company’s shift toward readiness for the automation and AI era. This requires sizing the workforce and skill needs, based on strategically identified use cases, to assess the potential future talent gap. From this analysis will flow details about the extent of recruitment of new talent, upskilling, or reskilling of the current workforce that is needed, as well as where to redeploy freed capacity to more value-added tasks.

Prioritize people development. To ensure that the right talent is on hand to sustain the company strategy during all transformation phases, leaders could consider strengthening their capabilities to identify, attract, and recruit future AI and gen AI leaders in a tight market. They will also likely need to accelerate the building of AI and gen AI capabilities in the workforce. Nontechnical talent will also need training to adapt to the changing skills environment. Finally, leaders could deploy an HR strategy and operating model to fit the post–gen AI workforce.

Pursue the executive-education journey on automation technologies. Leaders also need to undertake their own education journey on automation technologies to maximize their contributions to their companies during the coming transformation. This includes empowering senior managers to explore automation technologies implications and subsequently role model to others, as well as bringing all company leaders together to create a dedicated road map to drive business and employee value.

AI and the toolbox of advanced new technologies are evolving at a breathtaking pace. For companies and policy makers, these technologies are highly compelling because they promise a range of benefits, including higher productivity, which could lift growth and prosperity. Yet, as this report has sought to illustrate, making full use of the advantages on offer will also require paying attention to the critical element of human capital. In the best-case scenario, workers’ skills will develop and adapt to new technological challenges. Achieving this goal in our new technological age will be highly challenging—but the benefits will be great.

Eric Hazan is a McKinsey senior partner based in Paris; Anu Madgavkar and Michael Chui are McKinsey Global Institute partners based in New Jersey and San Francisco, respectively; Sven Smit is chair of the McKinsey Global Institute and a McKinsey senior partner based in Amsterdam; Dana Maor is a McKinsey senior partner based in Tel Aviv; Gurneet Singh Dandona is an associate partner and a senior expert based in New York; and Roland Huyghues-Despointes is a consultant based in Paris.

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