Quotes About Evolution

most recent common ancestor of everyone alive today on Earth lived only around 3,400 years ago.

Our findings suggest a remarkable proposition: no matter the languages we speak or the color of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

But we don't have more protein-coding genes than a chimpanzee. In fact, we have fewer genes than a roundworm. Or a banana.

Are we still evolving?' is a question that geneticists get asked a lot. Here is the answer: yes.

As long as humans keep having sex and that sex results in more humans, then we are evolving. We can avoid these evolutionary changes no more easily than we can change the weather.

what DNA analysis revealed more categorically than anything else was that we had sex with them, repeatedly, probably as soon as these two peoples met, and every time afterward.

The Neanderthals were a proto-species, an embryonic light that flickered in evolutionary time, but was not strong enough to stand across epochs.

Whichever way speech and language emerged in humans, it was a transition, with all those necessary but not sufficient pieces being nudged in one way or the other, by chance, by selection. The fact that it was a transition, not a revolution, means it took time.

Homo sapiens comes into being from 300,000 years ago, according to specimens from Morocco and east Africa, and by 100,000 years ago we have bodies pretty much the same as we do today.

It was the co-evolution of minds, brains and hands that drove us to use sticks, knap stones, refine those flakes, and eventually, after long periods of stasis, develop our technological prowess so that we could carve statues, and musical instruments, and weapons that made resources ever-more available. Despite a few animals having similarly complex brains, none has come close to our tool skills for many millions of years.

The revolution was not televised; it was livestreamed.

Nowadays, only the willfully ignorant dismiss the truth that we evolved from earlier ancestors.

Life is transition: The only things that are truly static are already dead.

Genetics can certainly tell us who our closest relatives really are, and can reveal so many mysteries of our deep past. But you have far less in common with your ancestors than you may realize, and there are people in your family from whom you have inherited no genes at all, and who therefore have no meaningful genetic link to you, even though in a genealogical sense you are most definitely descended from them.

The oldest genome of a European comes from a 37,000-year-old square-jawed man who washed up on the banks of the mighty River Don in southern Russia. He's called Kostenki today, and his DNA showed similarities with more recent European hunter-gatherers, as far afield as in Spain 30,000 years later

The pressures of natural selection have undoubtedly changed as a result of the evolution of our behavior and culture, but milk shows that, just as in every organism that has ever lived, over time our genes continue to change.

There are maybe 9,000 bird species living today, which is not quite double the number of mammal species.

The second point is that the world in which we live is shaped by us, by our practices and culture, by our very existence, and our DNA responds to that in turn. Genes change culture, culture changes genes.

But you have far less in common with your ancestors than you may realize, and there are people in your family from whom you have inherited no genes at all, and who therefore have no meaningful genetic link to you, even though in a genealogical sense you are most definitely descended from them.

In the genomes of the dead we can see natural selection at work.

It is the oldest depiction of the human body.

Our brains are large for our body size, but that ratio is much greater in ants and shrews.

By 40,000 years ago, there are clear, unequivocal depictions of figurative art in multiple forms, and clear evidence for imagination, abstract thought, music and profound fine motor skills. Something had changed.

on a long enough timeline we're all inbred.