What is it exactly that makes modern humans modern? We are subject to jet lag? We can walk and text at the same time (some of us, kind of?) Our minds and bodies bear the brunt of all the junk we’ve been spewing into the earth’s air, water, and soil since the Industrial Revolution?
Chris Stringer, a research leader in human origins at the Natural History Museum London, recently wrote a Comment in Nature speculating on what the precise features might be that define us as modern. Recent DNA evidence has shown that after modern humans left Africa around 60,000 years ago, they interbred with different groups of archaic humans—Neanderthals and Denisovans. As a result, different populations walking around today have varying amounts of this archaic DNA in their genomes.
Stringer is aware that this information could lead to the very dangerous assertion that all humans are modern, but some are more modern than others. So he writes, “All living humans are members of the extant species H. sapiens and, by definition, all must equally be modern humans.”
