Elaine Meinel Supkis
A most interesting breakthrough in genetic research of the evolution of humans. Seems part of our genetic code, a section that has not changed in 310 million years, namely, since the very first mammalians evolved from other land walking egg layers in the Carboniferous period, suddenly was jolted by a huge, sudden, one-time aberration! This happened in the womb, it would seem, at conception, and had a terrific effect on the development of the fetal brain.
By Jeremy Lovell Wed Aug 16, 1:05 PM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - They could be the missing links of human genetic evolution -- areas of human DNA that changed dramatically after the evolutionary division from chimpanzees, though they had remained almost unchanged for millennia before.Scientists from the United States, Belgium and France identified 49 "human accelerated regions" (HARs) showing a lot of genetic activity.
In the most active, identified as HAR1, they found 18 out of the 118 nucleotides had changed since evolutionary separation from chimps some 6 million years ago, while only two had changed in the 310 million years separating the evolutionary lines of chimps and chickens.
Something big happened! Why did this particular chain of DNA suddenly mutate so dramatically? If the Christians really want to believe in a 'creative' god--I far prefer to credit Mother Nature, myself---then this is a great Key, one that could justify them wanting to pray to some sort of entity that made us what we are today (Mother Nature doesn't give a hoot about prayers, She just wants us to iffing co-operate!).
It is really a miracle for a long sequence of DNA to suddenly undergo tremendous change. It is as if some of our ancestors, I would suggest only ONE, had a very strange baby indeed. Let's look closer at this Eve and her baby, let's name him 'Cain.'
Cain was, if a male, a very curious child. He thought strange thoughts. While others sat around, goofing off whenever the hunt for food or sex satiated, he was always poking around, testing things, trying to change stuff, meddling in other's affairs, being a total nuisance. As he got older, he discovered how to kill without being noticed. Namely, quiet assassinations. Eventually, he was the main source of sex and thus, this odd genetic strain was immediately spread throughout the population of a small group that all went out and eliminated any neighbor groups that couldn't figure out the new way of thinking about things.
If Eve had a daughter with this one time genetic change, she would have raised sons and daughters who could conspire with her on a much higher level than the surrounding population and as a group, probably took out or removed or killed off all others so they bred only with each other, seeing that the group's actions were totally obscure to all other great ape populations. For example, these deviants liked to carry sticks around a lot. They didn't pick up the nearest stick and then drop it when done poking at something or waving it at snakes, these mutants walked about with the sticks in hand for days and days, they even slept with these sticks. And had them handy when meeting apes without sticks!
The mere fact that the brain was altered in just one small way but one that is very significant, to cause these new apes to carry sticks around all the time, fixing the sticks so they could be used better and better, remembering these sticks and sticking to them, heh. Well, memory...the frontal lobes needing to remember stuff most animals don't bother with, this mutation was most important since the carrying of sticks meant eventually using burning sticks.
No animal, plant or insect uses fire. None can make fire. Truly, Prometheus was a mutant and the mutation is this gestational one on this particular chaain, the HAR1F.
HAR1 is part of a novel RNA gene HAR1F that is produced during the key formative period for the human brain from seven to 19 weeks of gestation.Not only that, but the RNA is produced by the Cajal-Retzius neuron that plays a crucial role in the six layers of neurons in the human cortex.
The modern human has many neotonic aspects. We are literally 'big babies.' We never achieve gorillian adulthood. Like baby chimpanzees, we have little fur, big heads, weak muscles but lots of energy and lots of curiousity. Indeed, most humans actually do age and grow out of our enternal infancy and become incurious, mentally rigid and inert, hoping tomorrow will be like today. This bizarre, natal mutation 6 million years ago occured in a situation where many mutations were happening to animals trapped in a geological disaster,the opening of the Great Rift Valley of Africa.
According to the detailed work of Manfred Strecker at Universität Potsdam in Germany, from 12 to 1.5 million years ago, the rifting of East Africa moved from northern Ethiopia southward to Mozambique. This rifting process not only produced a deep and wide rift valley but also lifted up rift shoulders on either side, de facto mountain ranges rising up to 4 kilometers high. Interestingly, since 1.5 million years ago, the rifting process in East Africa has all but stopped, becoming the dead branch of the triple junction, while rifting remains active in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
The effects of tectonics on human evolution are not just restricted to Africa and Asia. Gerald Haug of the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam in Germany and colleagues have shown that thousands of miles away, between 5 and 2 million years ago, the Panama ocean gateway between North and South America progressively closed. This sealing stopped the exchange of water between the Pacific and North Atlantic oceans. Its ultimate effect was to strengthen the Gulf Stream by pumping more warm water northward, providing the moisture source for the growth of the great Quaternary ice sheets that kicked off about 2.5 million years ago.
So, there were two forces at work here. One was the separation of the Atlantic from the Pacific when North and South America joined via Panama. A similar great change happened with South America cut loose from Antarctica, only this change had a much greater effect on Africa. The new cycle was now leading to increasingly harsh Ice Ages punctuated by amazing meltdowns. All the Eurasian monkeys and apes were pushed back into a narrow tropical belt or annihilated. The ones trapped in the increasingly deep African Rift Valley had to scramble to exist. Over time, the mutants became the only apes in the Rift Valley. On top of the greater Ice Age/Interglacial pendulum there was a quicker 24,000 year pendulum due to the earth's crooked wobble on its axis.
The most important orbital variable for the tropics is precession (the variation of Earth’s axis), which influences the amount of sunlight received during any particular season and has a cycle of about 20,000 years. Modeling work by Amy Clement of the University of Miami has shown that precession has very little effect on tropical temperatures, but a huge effect on rainfall. In her models, changing precession had the same scale of influence on rainfall as shifting from a glacial to an interglacial period. This link is supported by recent results from lake deposits and speleothems (mineral formations in caves) in Brazil that shows that rainfall there is also controlled by a 20,000-year precession cycle.The same evidence has led Maslin to suggest that this may be the key long-term repetitive climatic forcing that caused repeated bursts of evolution and thus the huge biodiversity in Amazonia. Therefore, even if there were no other changes in the East African environment over the last 10 million years, the amount of solar radiation received in any particular season could have varied by up to 20 percent, which would have had a significant influence on the timing and duration of the two wet seasons.
This precessional forcing of the East African climate is supported by tentative data from the lake studies by Deino, who has evidence of the appearance and disappearance of the deposition of lake sediments every 20,000 years. Moreover, the variable topography and global climate changes may have enhanced the sensitivity of East Africa to the precessional effects of seasons, thus impacting the rainfall of the region. This process would have had an important effect on human evolution, as the survival of any hominin is dependent on access to water.
This swift cycle meant only the very astute, forward-thinking, radically advancing individuals within the mutant ape group thrived. Over and over again, the mutants encouraged stranger and stranger children, namely, the ones that stayed 'babyish' the longest were the most successful thanks to the vicious defenses of the adults who carried at first, only sticks, then sticks with stones attached and then fire. The weaker and more helpless the baby, the fiercer the defenders.
Very rapidly, these mutants became adept at using various hand and vocal signals to communicate increasingly complex instructions to each other and most significantly, the children. Many scientific studies as well as direct observation of human children shows they have an amazing ability to learn many things over their hyper-extended childhoods. Unlike most animals, even ones with long gestations like elephants, they swiftly grow up, usually in less than five years. Humans have a very long infancy and childhood. Once born, they don't learn everything in one or three years, it takes a very long time, the more these mutations evolved down this particular path of adding layers and layers of grey matter to the forebrain, the longer the childhood and the more information the young learned.
The higher the intelligence, the longer the learning can happen. I am 55 years old and still feel like a school child much of the time! Or perhaps I am a batty old woman. Heh. Whatever.
The loss of the ability to comprehend or learn new things is hardly noticed by many humans, even, if they are satisfied with whatever they have when they reach 18 years of age but if one is very smart, this infantile ability to learn can stretch out for another 60 years, one hopes! This is why I am very alert to any Alzheimer's research. It would be a really unhappy thing, not being able to learn or remember new things every day!
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