Landmark ancient-genome study shows surprise acceleration of human evolution
by unsuspecting on 4/17/2026, 10:30:28 PM
Related: <i>Ancient DNA reveals pervasive directional selection across West Eurasia [pdf]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47791282">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47791282</a> (64 comments)<p><a href="https://x.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967</a> (<a href="https://xcancel.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967" rel="nofollow">https://xcancel.com/doctorveera/status/2044679999450664967</a>)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01204-5
Comments
by: idiotsecant
This comment section will be full of rational and well meaning discourse for sure.
4/18/2026, 12:59:55 AM
by: like_any_other
Is there any species, other than humans, that is found all across the globe (i.e. geographically separated), and has not differentiated into subspecies? Wolves, elephants, tigers, bears, and foxes have all been categorized into multiple subspecies each, distinct but able to interbreed.
4/18/2026, 12:04:12 AM
by: A_D_E_P_T
Not that surprising when you consider, as the paper does, the explosion of very meaningful traits such as the ability to digest lactose and various anti-malaria adaptations e.g. Sickle Cell and the Duffy-null mutation.<p>It's just controversial for obvious reasons. The notion that human groups may have meaningfully evolved in different ways over the past 10,000 years, and may still be evolving, is an unpopular one on both ends of the political spectrum.
4/17/2026, 10:58:42 PM
by: vomayank
[flagged]
4/17/2026, 11:18:39 PM
by: mohamedkoubaa
"To supercharge the search, Reich, Ali Akbari, a computational geneticist at Harvard Medical School, and their colleagues amassed the largest-ever collection of genomic data from ancient humans — from a total of 15,836 individuals from western Eurasia — including more than 10,000 newly sequenced genomes."<p>Without commenting on the content of this sentence or article, I will say that it is refreshing to see sentences like this in the wild after being regularly and constantly subjected to LLM slop.
4/17/2026, 11:26:53 PM