Modern Human Evolution?  How did all populations of humans advance at the same time?
538888
Hey! Your "other" question is already cluttered up with some high voltage discussion and nice arguements so, I thought I should post my answer here as it is more peaceful and calm here. I was wondering whether I should have posted my answer there? \n\nNow, I'll try to make sense while talking about a topic that I know little about. \n\n1- It all started with the arrival of the first bipedal- Australopithecus anamensis. (some might argue that it was Ardipithecus ramidus). Ok, the point is, as our ancestors started to learn to walk on two feet, they had some challenges to face as bipedalism reduced their speed considerably putting them at a clear disadvantage against their predators.\nNow, as this problem was faced by all the hominids all over the world at the same time, it led to some parallel thoughts (and thus inventions and discoveries) all over the world e.g. building homes, making weapons and tools etc. (The stone tools were first made by the handy man i.e. Homo habilis and not Australopithecus).\nThis tool technology was spread by Homo ergaster as they  migrated outside Africa.\n\n2- Then, in the course of evolution, the early humans started to have a complex cultural lives and they grew emotionally, e.g. the Neanderthals (who aren't our direct ancestors) started to bury the dead.\n\n3- As the homo species like homo erectus, homo neanderthalis, homo heidelbergenesis and ancient homo sapiens (Cro Magnon) made further advances in creativity and productivity, they all felt a natural need to pen down their thoughts. This led to the cave painitngs and carvings. All of those paintings can be interpreted as diary entries as you may see that the paintings and carvings simply depict what the early men "did" i.e. hunting, using tools etc.\nSo, I guess it is understandable why the "pictorial-scripts" developed contemporarily to each other.\n\n4- But the question still remains: Why were the origin of world's ancient scripts so contemporary to each other? I guess, as man found the pictorial depiction of thoughts and emotions more and more unconvenient and tedious due to the diverseness of thoughts and situations to be depicted, it started taking help of symbols. Perhaps, this behaviour was so "human-like" that every sub-species of the homo sapiens followed this pattern of 'depicting thoughts symbolically' universally.\n\n5- Another reason of this might be migration. Before the ancient civilizations like Inka, Mesopotamia, Egyptian etc. even came into existence, the early hominids led a nomadic life. According to the "Out of Africa Hypothesis", all the modern humans "Homo Sapiens" originated from Africa. Later, they migrated to Africa, Asia and Europe and formed groups.\nSo, I guess due to their similar ancestral origins, the human beings had a common problem solving approach and hence, attempted the problem of inconvenience of pictorial scripts in a nearly identical manner.\n\nThe scientific difference in the scripts can explain that they were devised on completely different grounds but, the approach was similar due to common origins and creative grounds.
985894
We are too similiar to each other to be considered different subspecies.  Things like skin color are literally skin deep (as genetics have proven so in the last decade).  As for intellect, we don't know if it is genetic or environmental.\n\nTo answer your question, evolution is a very slow process.  Like you yourself said, it will take a few millenia.  In order for humans to evolve into two differene subspecies we have to stay seperate, for example, two different groups and they should not intermate.  If it is a matter of migration, they should NOT migrate and stay in one place.  But the problem is that humans are very dynamic AND very impatient.  We cannot stay in one place for long and evolution based on third world or the developed world would not be possible unless all the developed world countries close their doors and allow NO ONE to immigrate or emigrate for a few thousand years.
379209
Nobody knows, but there are a number of hypotheses.  One of the more interesting is that our own ancestors out-competed them.  We once thought that all the hominid fossils found were ancestors to modern humans, but recent dating has shown that many many hominid species were contemporaneous, and a fair amount of evidence that one species would die out fairly quickly when another moved into the same geographic space.
1037582
Not all people evolved, as can be seen by some of the questions and answers here.\n\n(Did you really want a sensible answer or would a banana do?)
60131
I agree; humans and modern monkeys share a common ancestor.  Homosapien sapien (what *we* are) actually directly descended from homo erectus.  \n\nAll the scientific evidence backs this common descent up, btw.  We share a common morphology with chimps as well as a common molecular make up, which indicates that we share a common ancestor.  How else would you rationally explian it?\n\nFurthermore we share malfunctioning genes.  One in particular is a gene that prevents our bodies from producing vitamin C.  It seems that far back in our line of descent one of our distant ancestors was able to produce vitamin C.  This production was halted by a mutation - a mutation that all modern chimps share with us.  This is powerful evidence for a common lineage between chimps and humans because the best explanation is that this mutation was passed on through our evolutionary heritage.  \n\nThe creationist answer is, quite frankly, retarded.  They would have us believe that an all knowing and all benevolent entity created humans and chimps with a gene that produces vitamin C AND a gene that inhibits it's production.  An *intelligent* designer would just not have put in the genes for producing vitamin C in the first place!
849658
It's a gradual process, you'd never notice it.  It generally works like this: attractive people with talents that make money provide the resources for their children to be likewise successful.  These people are less likely to die than most people (better healthcare, less violent neighborhoods, etc.) and as such pass on their traits more readily.  It's an everyday process.\n\nThe modern trend in evolution is a focus away from disease resistance.  Once diseases would often kill people before they would have children, and so those that did have children would be on average 'healthier'.  In the advanced world today (Japan, western Europe, the US, etc.) this is less of an issue, so people with favorable traits in other respects but less 'genetic health' are more likely to pass on their genes.
5138
Exactly. Humans did not evolve from primates. The theory of evolution is full of holes.
1124393
Start by reading the texts.  We did not descend from chimps.  We evolved from a common ancestor.\n\nWe share more DNA with Bonobo Chimps than we do with Neanderthal.\n\nLooking for predictions is interesting but not likely to be helpful.  First the rate of genetic mutation in DNA is known. \n\nSecond, there is no telling what evolutionary pressures will cause an expression of a gene to reflect a mutation ahead of the event.\n\nThird, given all of the mutagenic chemicals used in so many facets of production and general living, it is hard to make the prediction you ask for.\n\nConsider these: \n\nIn fewer than 70 years our ability to use penicillin and many of the early antibiotics is severely diminished.  in fact there are strains of bacteria that are completely resistant to some antibiotics (i.e: vancomycin resistant enterococus = VRE). As people improperly use antibiotics, new and hardier strains of bacteria emerge.\n\nThe thre most devistating epidemics in human history were variation of the inlfuenza.  The first is the Spanish Flu of 1918 which killed more people in 18 months than WWI, or (24 years of AIDS).  Here is what the WHO says about all three (Spanish Flu, Asian Flu, and Hong Kong Flu).\n\nPandemic influenza\n\nThree times in the last century, the influenza A viruses have undergone major genetic changes mainly in their H-component, resulting in global pandemics and large tolls in terms of both disease and deaths. The most infamous pandemic was “Spanish Flu” which affected large parts of the world population and is thought to have killed at least 40 million people in 1918-1919. More recently, two other influenza A pandemics occurred in 1957 (“Asian influenza”) and 1968 (“Hong Kong influenza”) and caused significant morbidity and mortality globally. In contrast to current influenza epidemics, these pandemics were associated with severe outcomes also among healthy younger persons, albeit not on such a dramatic scale as the “Spanish flu” where the death rate was highest among healthy young adults.\n\nMost recently, limited outbreaks of a new influenza subtype A(H5N1) directly transmitted from birds to humans have occurred in Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of China in 1997 and 2003.
263791
Humans are designed to evolve; spiritualy, mentaly, and physicaly. Evolution takes place every generation and we are growing at a rapid rate.\nHere's an annalogy, a different type of being see's an infant human, and an infant hippo next to each other. The hippo can walk and defend itself right after birth, where as the infant human can do nothing but sit, cry, and roll around. It's obvious which would be "smarter" in the current state. Looking outside the "box of time" the human will grow to be smarted than a hippo in many ways when it reaches maturity because it evolves with time... hope i could help you feel better about everything, i feel like you've had a hard time lately... things will get better, just remember that.
998421
Technicallly, everybody is a mutant! We all carry some alterations unique to us in our genomes, this is part of what makes us different. And yes, over time we will evolve as a society to carry genes that are more advantageous to us due to the process of natural selection. It's a case of survival of the fittest!
17522
I would have to disagree with David to some extent. To evolve into a different species we would have changed enough so that different subpopulations of humans could no longer interbreed. Humans display a range of social and technological aptitudes and capacities throughout earth, the majority of which haven't even heard a dialtone let alone participated in any form of advanced travel or communications processes. However, none of these people are incabable of doing so if provided with the appropriate education needed. This suggest that there hasn't been any change in our molecular (genetic) makeup that provides us with these advanced technologies -- which is where the changes are needed to happen for biological evolution to occur. Even if you wanted to argue that social evolution has distinguished industrialized man from our primitive brethern enough to warrant a new species distinction, I would argue that we still haven't met one of the key requirements for doing so, there are no subgroups of humans on earth that are incapable of interbreeding with one another. Until that happens, no we haven't evolved from Homo sapiens sapiens to Homo sapiens futura. \n\nHowever, we will evolve into someting different! This is a certainty -- as long as our species doesn't become extint before that can happen! But don't expect that Homo sapiens will evolve into just one different species. Depending on what our environment(s) dictates, humans could evolve into numerous other species. Through the process of evolution, it is inevitable, but at the same time it is not predictable.
687692
As said earlier - HUMANS\n\nas we consume resources and increase population without any control limits. \nand modern humans seem to have lost any self-preservation instinct that might leave a viable eco-system for their off-spring
83045
"Evolutionary chains" go a long way towards explaining the development of life, including human life, from simpler organisms, but we haven't gotten very far yet in explaining how the mutation and reproduction systems that natural selection requires  got started in the first place.  Some researchers, and by that I mean mainstream ones who fully accept evolution as the fundamental organizing theory of biology, have tried to work around this problem by postulating that the original lifeforms didn't evolve on Earth at all.  However, while this changes the debate somewhat, by allowing far greater timelines for life to evolve, it still begs the question:  OK, if life evolved somewhere else first, how did it get started *there*?  I think we are much better served by looking at whether life could have evolved here, under the conditions of the primitive earth as we know them.
218300
Evolution at this scale takes thousands of years. You won't notice it in your lifetime. The truth is, we are evolving. People now are taller than they were 3,000 years ago. In another 10,000 years, if people are still around, we might have some serious adaptations that would just blow you away.
44459
We evolved\nLifeforms, came into existance over a billion years ago, in the form of little more than self replicating molecules, with amino acids and proteins. Eventually by the prosses of natural selection, cells emerged, then multicelled organisms, animals, vertibrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, mamals, primates, hominids, and finally, humans began to emerge only a million or so years ago, and civilization less than a mere ten thousand years ago. \nThe complexity of life may lead one to think that randomness could not creat such results. However, with quantum mechanics, one arrives at the conclusion that all possible universes exist, and with the anthropic principle, one sees that only in a rare universe in which evolution has been successfully accomplished can life contemplate these facts.
970035
Well I think you should start by using the reasons for human evolution. One of the most acclaimed reasons was the transition to bipedalism (walking on 2 legs) which is thougth to be first started around 3.5 million years ago with "lucy" or australopithecus afarensis. Such a change was obviously gradual and you should try to explain the numerous theories as to why we started to be bipedal. Most known theories are the change of landscape from rainforest to more savanna thus species had to rely on plains for food and could not totally arboreal. Also the search for food and mates over the vast savanna caused a gradual change to the more effiecient bipedal walking. Then you can start to talk about the tool making. You can start by using the chimp's use of a tool then transition through from australopithecus to homo where you can spend more time on species like homo erectus and homo sapiens neanderthalensis and his tool making skills. This may have been one of the sole reasons for our evolution as it classifies the need for food. Thus more effiecient species evolved and were selected for based on his cleverness to survive and eventually led to brain enlargening and the advent us, homo sapiens sapiens. So use the tool eras....olodowan, mousterian etc and classify periods and species and you're on track!!!!
452046
The human population did NOT start out as two (this readily confirmed by analysis of genes found in different groups of humans across the globe).  Also, Earth is some 4.57 billion years old.  Additionally, humans have existed for several million years.\n\n\nOkay...I'll humor you...\n\n-a human generation is 20 years\n-there are only 300 generations in 6000 years\n-before healtcare each generation more or less had enough time to mature and then have offspring\n-human births are risky compared to other animals and can possibly kill the mother\n-average lifespans before healthcare is estimated 20-35\n-sexual maturity generally occurs between 12-14\n-lifespan has only started increasing since 1800 so that is 200 years or 10 generations\n-Therefore to get and maintain 6.5 billion each successive generation had to have an increase of 21,666,666.667 individuals or more per generation to get from 2 to the 6.5 billion in the necessary time AND maintain population size.\n\nTherefore it is NOT possible for humans to have started from a population of 2 and increase up to 6.5 billion considering all factors involved.