A team of researchers from the Duke University has identified a group of human DNA sequences driving changes in brain development, digestion and immunity that seem to have evolved rapidly after our family line split from that of the chimpanzees, but before we split with the Neanderthals. Say the findings, that appear in the journal ‘Cell’, a lot of the traits that we think of as uniquely human, and human-specific, probably appear in the 7.5 million years since the split with the common ancestor we share with the chimpanzee. The rapid evolution of these regions of the genome served as a fine-tuning of regulatory control. More ‘switches’ were added to the human ‘operating system’, which was more finely tuned to adapt to environmental or developmental cues. By and large, those changes were advantageous to our species.
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