Chace Randolph

Blog Post 68 Written and Uploaded 09-22-2023

Sorry I missed the last post or two. Life’s been busy, and I had a birthday somewhere in that time frame too. So, here’s a spoiler free post, that will still give a little insight into what I have been working on/ thinking about for the future of the Descendant Saga. Because of the sci-fi I write, I was considering how much the human race evolved over a 10-12 thousand year time period. Granted I was looking forward in time. To help me gauge how much change there would be, I looked backwards in time. Here, with a couple cited sources, is what I found in the course of human evolution over the last 12 thousandish years. And looking forward I will be able to gauge about how much we will change as a species over the next twelve thousand years.

For starters, in this ten to twelve thousand years ago time frame is also about when man gained control of fire, and started the transition from foraging and hunting to farming. So part of our physical evolution was driven by the societal evolution from hunter gather’s to sedentary farming communities. Which in turn lead to competition for local resources, and not just family groups fighting, but whole communities, perhaps the first organized warfare as families became tribes and tribes became towns, and towns became cities and kingdoms. This farming, and concentration of resources, also allowed population centers to increase in density. The total world population would have increased substantially too. This would also have included the domestication of animals, early live stock such as sheep. However, these are again societal changed, not the physical evolutionary changes I am looking for.

Some of the physical changes are not outwardly noticeable, but when looking at human remains at a smaller scale, bone structure and density shows us, as animals were domesticated, the diet changed, and the body changed with, because of, or perhaps even the diet changed because of the body’s change as humans consumed more milk and cheese from herd animals. Teeth changed, especially the enamel around them, as farming aloud the consumption of crops, and early baked goods yielded from these crops. (Also note that this 12k year timeline is after the Neanderthals which ceased being a major portion of the population about 28k years ago.)

The physical changes while significant as we diverge from apes evolutionary, have been minor over the last 10-12k years. Increased reliance on vision, and reduced dependency on smell, a longer infant developmental period, with increased reliance on the parents, less body hair, the larynx being located lower in the neck, small changed in the shoulder blades and shoulders occurred as we used more tools, and threw more objects and climbed trees less. As mentioned earlier, changed to the teeth, not just he enamel, but also the canines becoming less pronounced.

Other changes have been more cosmetic than structural, changes in pigmentation and hair texture, as the genetics evolve, and co-existence between the various races sometimes ignores of overrules Darwinian natural selection. As well as collective immunity to things like small pox. Again, not outwardly visible, but the single biggest change, has probably been the slow steady increase in brain size as we increasingly grow more complex not just as a society or culture, but the kinds of, numbers of and complexity of tools we use. We need big brains to operate all that. While none of the links I looked at today mentioned it specifically, I have heard many things in the past about the shrinking and eventual loss of vestigial organs, things like the gal bladder, perhaps the pancreas, and maybe our pinky toes.

In conclusion, I think in the next twelve thousand years, we will outwardly look little different. We will probably continue to grow taller, leaner, thinner, with smaller teeth, larger brains and fewer toes as well as changes in body hair, sweat glands and perhaps our sense of taste, as visual stimuli continues to become more important, and a larger part of the brain is used to process that, rather than our sense of smell. Now that humans have largely evolved beyond the point of having natural predators (other than each other sadly) our sense of smell continued to be less and less important, and as the sense of smell is diminished, so too will out sense of taste. Anyway, some food for your thought, as I put in my own thought to what I’m going to do next in my sci-fi book series as I take a break from it to write my first romance/fantasy book. (don’t ask, I’m not excited about it, but I am told it will sell well, that romance is all the rage.)

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2209613120

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/01/230116163005.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution/The-fossil-evidence