Gene-culture co-evolution

In 2007, a team led by anthropologist John Hawks found that natural selection seems to have modified at least 7% of the human genome over the last 40,000 years, i.e., during the period when modern humans spread out of Africa and peopled the other continents. In addition, as they moved into these different physical and cultural environments, the pace of genetic change seems to have speeded up, particularly after the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago. The rate of change may then have been over a hundred times what it had been during most of human evolution (Hawks et al., 2007).