Conventional wisdom (and textbooks) has it that humans had reached their fully modern form in the mid-Palaeolithic (= old stone age) era hundreds of thousands of years ago, but recent research has suggested that around 40,000 years ago our genes began to evolve much faster.
This fascinating insight into humanity’s development comes from a wide-ranging study of human gene variations variants gathered by the International HapMap project. Investigators at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, studied 3.9 million simple differences in DNA called ‘Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms’ (SNP – pronounced ‘snips’) from 270 individuals in the U.S, including people of Han Chinese, Japanese, Yoruban, and Northern European extraction.
The researchers managed to confirm that 1800 genes – roughly 7% of the total in the human genome – have changed under the influence (apparently) of natural selection within the past 50,000 years. This high level of variations suggest that our rate of evolution as a species must have speeded up considerably, as there has not been time for many SNPs to be weeded out up to now.
The researchers say that this acceleration in our evolution started around 40,000 years until a peak was reached, which occurred in Europeans 5,000 years ago and Yoruban Africans 8,000 years ago.
Those of who take the biblical account seriously can’t help linking this with the account of early man recorded in Genesis chapter 2. Biblical scholars have concluded from the (albeit incomplete) genealogical lists given for kings, and other archaeological clues, that Adam and Eve – the couple from whom we are all descended - must have lived at least 6,000 and at most 60,000 years ago.
(Note: there is no scientific disagreement with the fact that everyone who is alive today is descended from a single pair of humans. The only point of disagreement between science and the Bible would be that the Bible apparently indicates that all humans who have
ever lived were descended from the same couple.)
It seem that something very special happened 40,000 years ago that has made us what we are as humans, and distinctly different from other primates. And in the biblical account of creation, it is only of Man that the bible says poetically “
God breathed into his nostrils the spirit of life”. That surely made him/her uniquely human, sharing something of the life of God himself, and thus ‘made in His image’.
Reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI:10.1073/pnas.0707650104