{"id":163483,"date":"2023-05-07T10:22:39","date_gmt":"2023-05-07T15:22:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/a-chance-event-1-million-years-ago-changed-human-brains-forever"},"modified":"2023-05-07T10:22:39","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T15:22:39","slug":"a-chance-event-1-million-years-ago-changed-human-brains-forever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/a-chance-event-1-million-years-ago-changed-human-brains-forever","title":{"rendered":"A Chance Event 1 Million Years Ago Changed Human Brains Forever"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/a-chance-event-1-million-years-ago-changed-human-brains-forever2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Like treasured recipes passed down from generation to generation, there are just some regions of DNA that evolution doesn\u2019t dare tweak. Mammals far and wide share a variety of such encoded sequences, for example, which have remained untouched for millions of years.<\/p>\n<p>Humans are a strange exception to this club. For some reason, recipes long preserved by our ancient ancestors were suddenly \u2018spiced up\u2019 within a short evolutionary period of time.<\/p>\n<p>Because we\u2019re the only species in which these regions have been rewritten so rapidly, they are called \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Human_accelerated_regions\">human accelerated regions<\/a>\u2019 (or HARs). What\u2019s more, scientists think at least some HARs could be behind many of the qualities that set humans apart from their close relatives, like chimpanzees and bonobos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like treasured recipes passed down from generation to generation, there are just some regions of DNA that evolution doesn\u2019t dare tweak. Mammals far and wide share a variety of such encoded sequences, for example, which have remained untouched for millions of years. Humans are a strange exception to this club. For some reason, recipes long [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":511,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,385,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-163483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-evolution","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/511"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}