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Ryan Bridge: Congratulations to the redheads · Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

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  Speaker 1: And a very special good morning to all the redheads
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  Speaker 1: listening to the show this morning. Lovely to have you
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: tuning in. There's a new Harvard research come out about
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  Speaker 1: human evolution and it mentions you quite specifically, so I'll
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  Speaker 1: come back to that a second. I'll come back to
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  Speaker 1: you in a second. But conventional wisdom says that Homo sapiens,
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  Speaker 1: that's us, we've been round about three hundred thousand years. Basically,
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  Speaker 1: we stopped evolving as soon as we came into being.
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  Speaker 1: We reached pete human and then we know, let's give
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  Speaker 1: up tools down, go home. We don't need to evolve anymore.
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  Speaker 1: It took us about seven million years to evolve from
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  Speaker 1: looking more like apes. It took us four million years
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  Speaker 1: to walk on two legs, which is one of the
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  Speaker 1: things that makes humans humans. And more recently, we learned
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  Speaker 1: how to use tools and language. That took a while.
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  Speaker 1: Some of us still not that great at it. But
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  Speaker 1: once we stopped hunter gathering, you know, roaming around looking
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  Speaker 1: for food and settle down to farm our own food
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  Speaker 1: and build cities and build civilizations and all that good stuff,
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  Speaker 1: natural selection wasn't such a big deal. But that is
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  Speaker 1: not true. They looked at DNA this study from sixteen
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  Speaker 1: thousand people over ten thousand years, some from ancient burial sites,
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  Speaker 1: some from modern DNA banks like the UK Biobank. So
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  Speaker 1: we used to think natural selection was changing just a
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  Speaker 1: dozen genes. Now they reckon it's hundreds of genes in
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  Speaker 1: modern times. You know Celiac disease that's now more common.
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  Speaker 1: And you might think, why, who doesn't love pasta and oats, right,
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  Speaker 1: you'd think evolution would edit out something like Celiac disease,
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  Speaker 1: But no, because the gene actually increases your resistance to
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  Speaker 1: a whole bunch of germs and bacteria, so you're less
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  Speaker 1: likely to die, You're more likely to live longer, and
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  Speaker 1: the longer you live, the more likely you are to
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  Speaker 1: pass that gene onto your kids. That's how natural selection works.
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  Speaker 1: The gene for narrow wastes has become more common. This is,
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  Speaker 1: according to the research, because we didn't need to store
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  Speaker 1: as much fat. You know, when we were hunting gathering,
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  Speaker 1: we had to store a lot of fat because we
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  Speaker 1: didn't know when the next meal was coming. Now we're farming,
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  Speaker 1: we don't need to do it. Although you wouldn't know
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  Speaker 1: that walking around the supermarket and checking out people's bellies.
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  Speaker 1: Would you, redheads? It's your time to shine. The redhead gene,
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  Speaker 1: the MC one R. It's become more common in recent history.
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  Speaker 1: It's popular, more gingers than ever before, more gingers than
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  Speaker 1: you can shake a stick at. Congratulations. The only risk
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  Speaker 1: mystery in this whole story is why there is no
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  Speaker 1: obvious survival advantage to being a ginger other than I
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  Speaker 1: suppose looking fabulous. For more from Early Edition with Ryan Bridge,
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: listen live to News Talks at B from five am weekdays,
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  Speaker 1: or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio