How we evolved over the last 150 years according to 7 changes in the human body

The evolution of the human species is taught at school as something ancient, as an event that took place thousands and thousands of years ago. However, this issue is often approached only as a historical one, not a biological one. People think that human evolution ended with our ancestors, the homo rhodesiensisand ignore that the body of human beings has continued to undergo changes in recent years.

Today, with the aim of deepening this and other questions, the awesome.club will show our evolution according to 7 changes in the human body.

Many researches show that the stature of the human being has increased in the last 200 years. In the UK, 20-year-old men are 10 centimeters taller than they were in 1890, for example. In Chile, the scientific journal eLife demonstrated that the increase was 11 centimeters.

At the same time that the planet’s temperature keeps increasing, our body temperature keeps decreasing. Researchers at Stanford University, in the United States, have shown that men in the 21st century had a reduction in body temperature of 0.59ºC compared to records from the 19th century. If we compare these data with those from 1800, we see that women also had a reduction, but around 0.32 ºC.

Today, boys and girls enter adolescence earlier than children did a century ago. This happens as a result of nutritional and health improvement. According to a study by the University of California, 15% of girls begin puberty by age 7. On average, it is estimated that puberty happened one to two years earlier than it did at the beginning of the 20th century.

Life expectancy has increased because there has been an improvement in health, nutrition, hygiene and other aspects of everyday life. According to a report published by the Santalucía Institute, experts expect that longevity will continue to increase and exceed 120 years of age by the end of the 21st century. If we compare data from the beginning of the 20th century, when only 26.2% of the population lived over 65 years, we can say that many millennials will reach 100 years of age.

Thanks to advances in technology and science, recent studies have revealed parts of the human body that were previously unknown. The interstice, for example, is an organ that always generates a lot of controversy among scholars. It is often described as a fluid-filled space between the skin and other organs, muscles, and circulatory system. It would therefore be a kind of network of cavities composed of collagen and elastin, present in many body tissues. Another example is from 2013, when a sixth layer was discovered in the eye, the Dua layer, which measures just 0.001 millimeters thick.

There are also parts of the human body that will disappear completely in a few years. Some people are born without wisdom teeth, also called third molars, because of a decrease in jaw size that happens due to a change in diet. Another example is the long palmar muscle, which runs from the elbow to the wrist. Several people are born without this muscle, used, for example, to climb.

It is not news to anyone that human beings are increasingly obese. This is mainly due to the amount of industrialized and fat-filled foods that people eat every day. According to the World Health Organization, obesity has nearly tripled since 1975. Data from 2016 show that more than 1.9 billion adults were overweight, and more than 650 million were obese. Experts indicate that changes in eating habits and physical activity are due to a lack of support for sectors such as health, education, urban planning, environment, transport, among others.

How do you see these changes? Do you know other alterations suffered by the human body in recent years? Share in the comments.