Humans Haven’t Stopped Evolving
26th July 2026
DURING THE LAST 50,000 years, human beings have transformed from nomadic hunter-gatherers roaming savannas to a species that traveled to the moon, invented the internet, and created an artificial form of intelligence. Yet many scientists believed that, during the same time frame, human DNA hadn’t changed much. Most research during the past two decades hinted that human evolution has largely slowed or changed so subtly that existing tools couldn’t detect it; evidence seemed to suggest that civilization put humans beyond the reach of natural selection.
“It’s like we had in our heads that a few hundred thousand years ago we had reached some kind of evolutionary optimization,” says professor of genetics and human evolutionary biology David Reich.
That changed with Reich’s latest work. Using the largest collection of ancient human DNA samples ever compiled, paired with new statistical methods, Reich and his colleagues discovered that the human genome has actually evolved rapidly during the past 10,000 years. The study, published in Nature in April, showed hundreds of genetic shifts in 16,000 individuals who lived in modern-day Europe across an 18,000-year period. The longer timespan provided a baseline that allowed the researchers to see how genes evolved during the most recent 10,000 years.
Natural selection is still working; it’s just selecting for different characteristics. It’s an automatic process, like gravity.