Human Evolution Explored

An interesting article from sciencedaily.com was Has Evolution Given Humans Unique Brain Structures. Evolution is the gradual change in the genetic composition of a population over time. In this article it described how humans brains differ from the brains of the rhesus monkey, which the article claims humans evolved from. The article states; "Humans have at least had two functional networks in their cerebral cortex not found in the rhesus monkey. This means that the new brain networks were likely added in the course of evolution from primate ancestor to human."

One problem that I found with this article is that it says humans evolved from monkeys. This is not necessarily true. According to http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/faq/cat02.html, Humans are closely related to monkeys, but did not evolve from them. Humans and monkeys share a common ancestor, which scientists estimate lived 5-8 billion years ago. Eventually, this ancestor species split into two separate lineages, one evolving into apes, gorillas, and monkeys and the other into early human ancestors called hominids. Considering that humans did not come evolve from monkeys, this article is no longer very useful. This would disprove the theory that humans acquired unique brain structures through evolution because the data shows human brain structure differing from the rhesus monkey, but if humans did not evolve from the rhesus monkey, than this concludes nothing.

If it is somehow possible that humans did in fact evolve from the rhesus monkey, then this article brings up an interesting point. The human brain may not be homologous to any of the ancestors humans evolved from, meaning that through evolution humans have acquired unique brain structures. If this is possible, it is interesting because this could mean that other species could acquire unique structures through evolution. It could also mean that over a large amount of time new unique structures will emerge through evolution in humans or other species.