In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It revolutionized our understanding of biology. Darwin also inadvertently centered evolutionary theory in the intellectual debates of Victorian-era Britain. Is man indeed a beast? Does he have an immortal soul? Is he a special creation? Darwin’s work triggered a change in the understanding of humans in the universe.
Still, though Darwin created the modern understanding of human origins, his theory and the work that followed him for decades left open the question of how humanity has evolved in more recent millennia. Yet for decades it was common for evolutionary biologists to insist that human evolution had essentially stopped tens of thousands of years ago.
The question of recent human evolution has existed to a large degree in the shadow of famed paleontologist and naturalist Stephen Jay Gould. Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium held that genetic evolution proceeded in fits and starts. And for Gould, humanity was in a period of genetic stasis, because humans were now adapting to new conditions by changing culture and lifestyle, not genes. “There’s been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years,” Gould argued in an interview published in 2000. “Everything we call culture and civilization we’ve built with the same body and brain.”
