East Asian Physical Traits Linked to 35,000-Year-Old Mutation

Gaining a deep insight into human evolution, researchers have identified a mutation in a critical human gene as the source of several distinctive traits that make East Asians different from other races. Researchers believed thicker hair shafts, more sweat glands, characteristically identified teeth and smaller breasts.

A team of researchers, Yana G. Kamberov and Pardis C. Sabeti at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., tested the gene in mice that already have EDAR (an ancient gene in sharping hair, skin, teeth). Once the mice grew up, the researchers found they did indeed have thicker hair shafts, confirming that the changed gene was the cause of East Asians’ thicker hair.

Joshua Akey, a geneticist at the University of Washington in Seattle believed the genes spread among East Asians was sexual selection. The sexually visible effects of EDAR are likely to have been stronger drivers of natural selection than sweat glands. Dr. Kamberov has another theory that each of the effects of the EDAR variant may have been favored by natural selection at a different time.

Each race has a different set of selected regions, reflecting the fact that the human population had dispersed from its African homeland and faced different challenges that led to genetic adaptation on each continent. This conclusion explains the obvious and visible variations within the human species, just like there are cats of various colors, dogs of various breeds, and birds of numerous shapes and sizes. This can be referred to as variation within a particular species, but should this study on East Asian traits be credited as giving us "a deep insight into human evolution" - which actually entails the transformation of one particular species into a new, completely different one?