Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected] did humans evolve, and will they evolve more? – Anya T., 13, Brookline, MassachusettsEverything that is alive today has evolved, including human beings.Our ancestors evolved many traits that helped them survive in their environments, and we still have many of those traits today. Two of the most important and consequential traits are walking on two legs and having a large brain.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementI’m a scholar of human evolution. I study how evolution works, including how it has changed the shape of the bones in the skull and ankle of humans and other primates.So how did humans evolve, and where will evolution take us in the future?What evolution isPeople pass traits to their children through genes. We can have different versions of the same genes – called alleles – and evolution occurs when the proportion of these alleles in the population changes over multiple generations.Alleles in a population often help certain individuals survive in their own environment. This means that evolution isn’t about becoming the fastest, or the strongest, or the smartest, because it all depends on the environment.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementEarly ancestors of humans evolved to walk upright on two legs around 6 million years ago.Scientists are still trying to figure out why our ancestors started walking on two legs. Today, the most common hypothesis is that walking on two legs probably helped our ancestors to move between forest patches that were shrinking due to a changing climate.What about our brains?More in ScienceRelative to the size of our bodies, humans have the largest brains on the planet. Elephants have bigger brains, but their bodies are even bigger than ours.Without big brains we wouldn’t be able to innovate, such as by creating an alphabet, sending machines to Mars or creating vaccines that protect us against measles and other dangerous diseases. Our big brains make it possible to share information culturally through books, storytelling or even movies, rather than only passing our genes to the next generation.AdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementAdvertisementOur ancestors’ brains got bigger over the course o …
