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Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus11/28/2012 8:42:18 pm PST

One aspect of evolution - the mutation of genetic material - has definitely increased in humans the past 5000 years:

Past 5,000 years prolific for changes to human genome

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A study published today in Nature3 now helps to clarify when many of those rare variants arose. Researchers used deep sequencing to locate and date more than one million single-nucleotide variants — locations where a single letter of the DNA sequence is different from other individuals — in the genomes of 6,500 African and European Americans. Their findings confirm early work by Akey1 suggesting that the majority of variants, including potentially harmful ones, were picked up during the past 5,000–10,000 years. Researchers also saw the genetic stamp of the diverging migratory history of the two groups.

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Akey and his colleagues were able to dig out genetic variants occurring in less than 0.1% of the sample population — a resolution that is a full order of magnitude finer than that achieved in previous studies, […]

Of 1.15 million single-nucleotide variants found among more than 15,000 protein-encoding genes, 73% in arose the past 5,000 years, the researchers report.

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Not enough generations have passed, or sub-populations been isolated from inter-breeding, for there to have been any substantial selection on these variations, I suppose.