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Comment by me_me_mu_mu | Hacker News Reader

Curious if that applies to humans as well. I’m from S Asia and well.. I do have my distinct looks that I share with my family and community, that are different from other communities. Are humans like that as well? I am aware of the migration theories and people crossing ice bridges and all that, but did people evolve in different areas and then spread out after settling their original area?

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Another good example of convergent evolution in humans is adaptation to high altitudes. Andean, Tibetan, and Ethiopian populations all separately evolved distinct mechanisms to thrive in relatively hypoxic environments [0].

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2018.023...

The closest example of convergent evolution in humans would probably be native populations in South America redeveloping darker skin tones to deal with sun burn the same way we initially had it in Africa. I don’t know the exact genetics, but it seems to be an independent adaptation rather than a holdover from an older population.

There might be some others such as lactose tolerance that are less obvious.

I'd be very interested in hearing about that. My guess would have been that it was more a matter of the previously suppressed genes for dark skin coming back to the fore.

I agree. Humans reached South (and even North) America only relatively recently in the evolutionary terms - 14-16 thousand years before present. It's not enough time for evolutionary processes to start kicking-in.

Another possible explanation (speculation) is that they met and mixed with yet undiscovered hominid species.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlement_of_the_Americas

The current view is skin color is simple evolutionary response which can easily occur on those timescales. https://www.psu.edu/impact/story/the-evolution-of-skin-color...

Several things have changed as recently as 11,000 years. “Examples for adaptations related to agriculture and animal domestication include East Asian types of ADH1B associated with rice domestication,[71] and lactase persistence.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recent_human_evolution

Very neat. I didn't know about the folate angle selecting for dark skin in the first place.

From genetic studies, we can safely say that all humans are closely related and members of the same species. We are not an example of convergent evolution.

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