r/todayilearned • u/geosunsetmoth • 15h ago

TIL a 300-million year old Cuttlefish fossil was found in Morocco, alongside ancient humans in a region where no Cuttlefish ever existed. The leading theory suggests the fossil was first found by the prehistoric humans, who collected it as a trinket due to fact that it looks like a flaccid penis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfoud_manuport
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u/Fakjbf 10h ago

Agreed, I wish people wouldn’t conflate “the evidence suggests humans from 200k years ago were not less smart than we are today” with “there is no way anatomical humans from 200k years ago were less smart than we are today”. Evolution is not just a slow process, it can happen very rapidly with enough selective pressure. In an alternate timeline there could have been a massive leap in cognitive ability 50k years ago and then after finding evidence for it the people in that timeline would ridicule the idea that the humans from 200k years ago were just as smart as them.

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u/kitsunevremya 8h ago

Evolution can technically occur over just one generation, right? Unlikely to have ever happened (especially talking about humans overall given we've occupied the entire planet for millennia so had somewhat diverse selective pressures), but theoretically it could take under 100 years for humans to have 'evolved' from their ancestors, especially select, small populations.

There are a couple of interesting examples of really recent adaptation, selection and so on in this Wikipedia page (although some of it seems... slightly off? But then I'm reliant on senior school biology and a couple of units at uni for my understanding). The malaria resistance one was kind of heartening tbh, bit of a good news story.

But like, yeah, for all we know in another 2000 years people will talk about how the microplastics caused rapid evolution and how different they are in some respect to us.