No one knows what the future will be like. Humans are still evolving. Our bodies and brains are different from our ancestors, and our descendants will be different from us. It is generally believed that modern Homo sapiens did not evolve much after the Pleistocene. However, a new study on the genetic information of all ethnic groups in the world found that the speed of human evolution accelerated after the development of agriculture and cities. If we continue to evolve, what will human beings look like after experiencing unexpected development brought by environment and society in one thousand years? In Tuoban, the answers to guesses range from hope to nightmare. When asked about people's imagination of human appearance in the future, there are usually only two answers. Some people will mention the description of old science fiction: a brain person with a raised forehead and a higher IQ; Another school will say that the human body will not evolve, technology has ended cruel natural selection, and only culture continues to evolve. Brain-man theory has no real scientific basis. By analyzing the fossil records of human heads in the past thousands of generations, we can see that the period of rapid growth of human brain capacity withdrew a long time ago, so when asking the above questions a few years ago, most scientists would choose the view that human evolution has stagnated. However, using DNA technology to detect the past and present genomes, we get completely different results and set off a revolution in evolutionary research. After the birth of modern Homo sapiens, not only major gene recombination events are still emerging one after another, but also the evolution speed is getting faster and faster. Humans, like other creatures, will experience the most drastic changes in body shape in the early stage of species formation, but then genes will continue to cause changes in human physiology (and possibly behavior). Until the recent human history, the differences between people scattered around the world were still increasing. Even today, modern life continues to promote the evolution of some genes that affect behavioral characteristics. If a huge brain is not the future direction of mankind, then what is? Will our bodies get bigger or smaller? Will you become smart or stupid? Will those emerging diseases and global warming affect human evolution? Will there be new species? Or when we implant silicon and steel into the brain and body, the future evolution of human beings will no longer depend on genes, but on technology? Will we become the next agent that will dominate the future of the earth: the builder of machines? The number one evolutionist who tracks human evolution has always been a paleontologist who studies ancient fossils. The history of hominids can be traced back to more than 7 million years ago, when a small group of hominids named Sahelanthropus tchadensis appeared. After that, many quite diverse primitive human members joined in one after another. The actual figures are still controversial. There are at least nine known species, and there must be traces of other primitive people buried in the incomplete fossil record. Since early human remains are rarely preserved in sedimentary rocks without being eaten by animals, this estimate changes every year with new discoveries and new explanations published in papers. The evolution of each new species is due to the separation of a small group of individuals from a larger group in order to adapt to new environmental conditions, which has undergone several generations of changes. After long-term separation from the same kind, this small group walked alone on the genetic road, and finally its members could no longer mate with their parents and reproduce. Fossil records tell us that the oldest members of modern Homo sapiens lived in Ethiopia 195000 years ago, and then spread all over the world. By 1 10,000 years ago, modern Homo sapiens had successfully settled in all continents except Antarctica, and they also adapted to many different local environments (and other evolutionary drivers), forming the human race as we know it now. Obviously, the races separated in different areas only maintain a little more contact with each other, so they will not evolve into new independent species. After all races have spread to almost every corner of the world, we may think that the evolution process is almost over. It turns out that this is not the case. A year ago, Henry C. Harpending of the University of Utah and John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison analyzed the genetic markers of 270 people from the data of the International Human Genome Haplotype Project (see Tracking Human DNA Footprints in August 2008). These people belong to four ethnic groups: China Han, Japanese and Yoruba. They found that until 5,000 years ago, at least 7% of human genes had evolved, and most of the changes were related to adapting to special environments, both natural and artificial. For example, most Han people and Africans can't digest and absorb fresh milk as adults, while in Sweden and Denmark, almost everyone can digest milk, which is to adapt to the rich dairy environment in northern Europe. Another study, conducted by Harvard University's Sabetti team, used a lot of genetic variation data to look for traces of natural selection in the genome. More than 300 loci in the human genome have recently been changed to improve the chances of survival and reproduction, including resistance to Lassa fever, an infectious disease caused by virus, which is rampant in Africa. Some African ethnic groups have also evolved resistance to other diseases such as malaria; The skin pigment and hair follicle development of Asians have changed; Nordic people evolved whiter skin and blue eyes. Harpenting and Hawkes' team estimated that since our earliest hominid ancestors parted ways with the ancestors of modern chimpanzees, the speed of human evolution has been hundreds of times faster in the past 1 10,000 years than in any previous period. They believe that the speed of human evolution is accelerated because human beings have moved to different environments, and the development of agriculture and cities has changed their living conditions. These changes are not only the habit of farming itself, or the landscape changes brought about by the reclamation of wasteland into farmland, but also the fatal threats brought by poor sanitary conditions, brand-new diets, new diseases (spread from other people or livestock) and other factors. Although some people have reservations about this estimate, they all agree with its basic argument: human beings are the number one evolutionist. Unnatural selection In the past century, the situation of modern homo sapiens has changed again. Convenient transportation has opened up the isolation caused by geographical reasons in the past, and also broken the social barrier of racial isolation. The human gene bank has never been so widely integrated with the local ethnic groups that were completely isolated before. In fact, human migration ability may make races more and more like each other. At the same time, science and technology and medicine have also hindered human natural selection. At present, the infant mortality rate is not high all over the world, and people with fatal genetic defects can now survive, get married and have children. Natural elimination in the law of survival is no longer applicable.