5 Surprising Facts You Didn’t Know About How We Evolved

Though we are daily bombarded with all the crazy information about the novelties of the scientific world, we know very little about our race and its evolution. Just ask anybody, and you will get some basic stuff. The average knowledge goes around our similar traits to those of primates versus the main differences, like changing our position to biped living, losing our body hair, brain enlargement.

Going in deeper, there is so much more about our evolution. Furthermore, few people know that human evolution is still going on. These evolutionary elements still influence us and have a very active implication on our current lives.

Here are some evolution trends that are active in our human race.

Testosterone Isn’t the Winning Solution

The general belief is that humans function on the classic mating instinctive elements. Thus, the attractiveness of a man used to be attributed to his testosterone level. It was believed that any woman is unconsciously attracted by a man with a higher level of testosterone, as she instinctively feels safer and better taken care of.

However, things changed since the dynamic between men and women does not keep the man in the provider position anymore. Recent research data proved during the last decade that fathers these days have lesser testosterone levels, and testicular parameters, than males that do not have children. This means that women do not choose anymore as fathers for their children, and partners for their daily life, the most macho men. Instead, these men full of testosterone are taking an active role in the competition taking place during dating and mate selection periods.

Human Jaws Keep on Reducing in Size

During prehistoric times, first humans used to have wider, stronger jaws. The reduction of human jaws has been a continuous process since those ages, mainly due to our diet. From raw ingredients and crude meat to our current days when we mostly eat pre-processed, very soft food, some of the human jaw proportions got lost. We no longer need to bite as hard and chew voraciously, as we did thousand years ago. This is why people these days barely have space for wisdom teeth and have them pulled off. The new jaw size is in harmony with the evolution of our bodies, which also are constantly getting smaller and more fragile.

Lower Bodily Temperature

Something amazingly apparently happens to our body temperature. We seem to get colder bit by bit, with each decade. Not with much because we remain healthy warm humans. However, researchers noticed we drop around .05 every 10 years. The reasons are somewhat a mystery. Probably our better modern living conditions, the advanced medical facilities, and the reduction in chronic inflammation inside human bodies.

Lighter Bones

On the same page with getting thoroughly smaller, evolution is working on our bones. Scientists consider that a certain level of degrading in the density of human bone tissue coincides with our species starting to live more as an agricultural society, to the detriment of hunting. More sedentary lives produce a proportional change in our skeleton. This evolutionary trend continues in our modern society, no matter if people are a part of a very industrial, urban life or of a more active agricultural-rural sector.

Though we are getting fragile, we seem to be well adapted to current lifestyles. We don’t have increased levels of bone breakage, because our modern environment is safer, we have lots of help from technology and equipment that take over the heavy part of our activities.

Cheese, our New Best Friend?

Despite cheese being a worldwide delicacy, nutritionists are usually against its consumption. Cheese, and especially milk, has never been considered a favorite food for adults. Besides the direct and fast effects on bowels, many people have had lactose intolerance since ancient times. This reaction to milk and cheese is in direct relationship to a child’s evolution into adulthood when the milk digesting enzyme is no longer produced. However, scientists discovered that humans are in a continuous adaptation to milk ingestion. Currently, a whole 35% of the adult population can digest cheese without any repercussions. The percentage is continuously increasing. This continuous adaptation to cheese is, on one hand, attributed to the old famine periods when the surviving communities were those able to digest anything, thus passing on lactose tolerance genes. On the other hand, there are the modern advanced dairy processing technologies, which allow us to produce softer and easily digestible creamy cheese types.