New popular piece on our hand and foot evolution study:
current.fas.harvard.edu/stories/evol...
2/ Okamoto et al. used a technique called a Massively Parallel Reporter Assay (MPRA) to screen human and chimp versions of ~70,000 regulatory elements active during human skeletal development. 🧬
3/ The number of differences is substantial – over 11,000 active regions showed significantly different regulatory activity between humans and chimps. This suggests that human evolution didn’t involve a just few key changes, but thousands of changes genome-wide.
4/ Conclusion? Human skeletal evolution follows a polygenic model—tweaks across thousands of elements, not just a few "silver bullet" mutations.
Read the full open-access paper here: academic.oup.com/gbe/article/...
To grasp the evolution of the human hand, look to your feet.
1/ How did the human skeleton evolve to support bipedalism and tool use? 🦴 A new study from my lab in Genome Biology and Evolution dives into the genomic changes that separate us from chimpanzees during skeletal development. academic.oup.com/gbe/article/.... Here's a quick overview of what we found:
Abstract. Every element of the human skeleton exhibits some differences in comparison to our closest living relatives, chimpanzees. Many of these skeletal
