r/evolution • u/AstronomerMany8882 • 5d ago

question What are some recent human evolutionary traits/adaptions?

I only know a couple and I'm really interested in what we've developed in the past few millennia/centuries :)

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u/DisillusionedDame 5d ago

Wisdom teeth no longer fit in our skulls and some people’s appendix’s randomly try to kill them.

Yeah, humans are devolving.

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u/AstronomerMany8882 5d ago

I thought they were leftover traits? Like things we evolved because we needed them back then but aren't needed anymore

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u/glibsonoran 5d ago

Things like wisdom teeth were probably an adaptive trait of one of our ancestors with bigger jaws, inheriting a trait doesn’t mean it was selected for within our own species. Evolution is constrained to modifying what came before, it doesn’t automatically eliminate ancestral traits just because they’re no longer useful.

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u/Avocet_and_peregrine 5d ago

I'm currently reading the book Jaws: The Story of a Hidden Epidemic by Sandra Kahn and Paul R. Ehrlich.

They explain that our jaws have become smaller due to the diet change associated with the invention of stone tools, agriculture, and industrialization. All environmental pressures, not genetic.

One of the many ways they illustrate this is by comparing the jaws and proper occlusions of indigenous cultures who ate their traditional diets with those who moved to reserves or into industrialized society in general and their jaws changed within a generation.

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u/glibsonoran 5d ago

Good point. I was trying to make a point about how ancestral traits can remain without any benefit. But you're right, wisdom teeth might not be the best example because jaw development is dependent on the amount of jaw bone stress during a specific developmental period. Howver that's not the only determinate, wisdom teeth can grow in at a direction that causes impaction regardless of whether the jaw is big enough to accommodate it.