The select few

摘要

The advent of agriculture 9000 years ago, which many people believe should have brought human evolution to a halt, in fact did no such thing. A long-term study of a farming community in Mali has revealed that human fertility there is still being shaped by evolution, despite the more reliable flow of food to the family table. Some researchers think that the abundance of food produced by agriculture should have spared us from the rigours of natural selection. That means, they argue, that the rules governing our behaviour―which affect how many children a woman has―would not have adapted to the farming lifestyle but stayed tuned to the hunter-gatherer era. "It's hard to imagine that complex behavioural adaptations were constructed very recently," says Margo Wilson, an evolutionary psychologist at McMaster University near Toronto.