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What Will Humans Evolve Into? Your “Modern” Brain Hasn’t Changed in 50,000 to 100,000 Years
No one has the slightest idea of what humans will "evolve into". But we do know that the so-called "modern" human brain hasn't changed much at all in 50,000 to 100,000 years.
Suppose you were to jump into a time machine and zip back to the Stone Age. Say, 64,813 years back. You look around and what do you see? Why, a newborn Homo sapiens baby. Alas, she’s orphaned and wailing, poor dear. You scoop her up, jump back into your time machine, and whip back to the present.
Now what do you do? Contact Marshal McDillon, of course. His cousin’s family, the Donkersloots, agree to raise the Stone Age baby.
What’s she like anyway, with her 64,813-year-old brain and body?
She’s no different from anybody alive today. She looks the same as any newborn in Dodge City. Or even Wichita. As she grows up, she’ll learn language normally, play piano, hang around in malls, ride horses, have her pick of ardent male admirers, graduate from university, and become a psychology professor.
Evolutionary lag is the period of time it takes for a mutation in an individual that results in a significant survival or reproductive advantage to become encoded in the human genome. The interval is of the order of several hundred centuries—tens of thousands of years.
On the other hand, the selective pressure of local climatic conditions can bring on less significant adaptations over shorter time periods. For instance, variations in skin color (a topic discussed in Section 1.5).