new findings in evolution research

At the Smithsonian | December 28, 2023

Thirteen Discoveries Made About Human Evolution in 2023

Smithsonian paleoanthropologists reveal some of the year’s most fascinating findings about human origins

Ryan McRae and Briana Pobiner

The year 2023 proved to be another exciting 12 months for research in human evolution. Many of the top stories tell us more about the diet and tool use of our early ancestors and relatives and the environment where they lived. Others provide evidence for behaviors: hunting, making jewelry and interacting with each other in previously unexplored ways. Whether by taking a fresh look at previously excavated fossils or uncovering new evidence altogether, all of these stories expand the breadth of knowledge about our shared ancient past and bring to light more information about what it means to be human.

Neanderthals were the resident gourmands of ancient Eurasia.

Neanderthals are probably the most well-known hominins among our closest relatives. How they lived and why they went extinct while modern humans survived is a topic of great scientific and public interest.

New research this year gives us more clues about how Neanderthals lived and hunted and what they might have eaten. Three studies shed new light on Neanderthal behavior and diet, increasingly showing that our closest extinct relatives are not that different from us.

First up is a study from October by a team headed by Gabriele Russo. Analyzing the bones of a 48,000-year-old cave lion from Siegsdorf in southern Germany, the researchers discovered a clear puncture mark on one of the ribs, three marks potentially left from wooden spears, and multiple cut marks across other bones. The team also analyzed additional cave lion remains from Einhornhöhle in northern Germany and concluded, based on cut marks found on the phalanges, or toe bones, that Neanderthals were hunting cave lions for their skins.

The evidence suggests that Neanderthals were hunting and butchering cave lions, an apex predator, which would have been a dangerous target. The consumption of meat from cave lions is one hypothesis for why Neanderthals show, based on nitrogen isotopes, a unique nitrogen-rich dietary signature that gets concentrated as it moves up the food chain. The ability of Neanderthals to successfully hunt high-risk prey suggests the potential for communication, planning and cooperation in hunting.

To bring down big game, Neanderthals organized hunting parties.

Speaking of high-risk prey, the second study in February found that 125,000 years ago in central Germany Neanderthals were hunting and butchering giant now-extinct elephants.

Sabine Gaudzinski-Windheuser and colleagues studied a massive collection of more than 3,000 bones from 70 individual straight-tusked elephants from the site of Neumark-Nord 1, originally excavated in the 1980s and 1990s. Cut marks on bones from all across the elephants’ bodies indicate that Neanderthals were able to get to the meat, brains and even fat from the elephants’ foot pads. Most of the elephants butchered were large adult males, which in modern elephant groups often live alone—so they may have been a lower-risk, higher-return prey target.

Straight-tusked elephants were the largest animals in Europe at the time, growing more than 13 feet tall and weighing up to 13 tons. The researchers estimated that just one large male elephant could have yielded four tons of meat, fed 25 Neanderthals for three months, and taken three to five days for a group that size to process.

This huge amount of meat suggests that Neanderthals may have gathered in larger groups, perhaps seasonally, and had some kind of food storage or preservation techniques. Furthermore, the dating of elephant bones at the site covers a span of about 2,000 years, demonstrating a behavior that continued in the same place across generations.

Gaudzinski-Windheuser’s research team published in December additional similar evidence of straight-tusked elephant butchery at two other, contemporaneous Neanderthal sites at Gröbern and Taubach in Germany , indicating that Neumark-Nord 1 was not a one-off; Neanderthals on the North European plain routinely exploited straight-tusked elephants during the Last Interglacial Period.

Neanderthals feasted at a crab roast by the sea.

The next research study , published in February by Mariana Nabais and colleagues, provides evidence for Neanderthals exploiting marine resources—crabs.

While small prey like rabbits, birds and shellfish may not return as many calories per animal as larger prey, these creatures are typically easier to acquire and more reliable to access at different times of year.

At Gruta da Figueira Brava, a cave site in coastal Portugal, the researchers showed that Neanderthals were cooking and eating brown crabs as early as 90,000 years ago. Black burn marks on some of the crab carapaces and pincers indicate that the crustaceans were subjected to temperatures up to 600 to 900 degrees Fahrenheit, indicative of being roasted on coals. The type of fracture on the crab pincers supports this interpretation, and it appears that the Neanderthals there particularly went after larger crabs.

Consumption of marine foods by Neanderthals casts doubt on the hypothesis that eating shellfish led to modern humans in sub-Saharan Africa evolving uniquely large brains. Gathering of marine resources also implies swimming or knowledge of the tides.

Cut marks on a 1.45-million-year-old leg bone are potential evidence for hominins butchering and eating each other.

It seems Neanderthals may not have been the only ones with eclectic taste buds. While finding cut marks on animal bones is fairly common after the advent of stone tools in the archaeological record, finding cut marks on hominin bones is much more surprising .

A paper published in June by one of the authors of this article, Briana Pobiner, and colleagues presents evidence for the earliest cut marks on a hominin postcranial (below the head) bone. Dating to 1.45 million years ago from Koobi Fora, Kenya, this shin bone, originally found by Mary Leakey in 1970, has been previously ascribed to two species: either Paranthropus boisei or Homo erectus .

The marks, which are all in a group and generally facing the same direction, are the same color as the surrounding bone, indicating that they were not made during excavation. Nine of the eleven marks were straight in trajectory and V-shaped, consistent with marks made by stone tools. The remaining two most closely resemble lion tooth marks, based on comparison to modern specimens with tooth marks of different predators, although the authors can’t rule out the possibility that the tooth marks may have been left by a hominin. In the absence of clear hominin tooth marks on the bone, cut marks like these are the strongest evidence of potential anthropophagy, or cannibalism—one member of a species eating another. Since we aren’t sure what species the tibia belongs to, and we can’t know which species made the cut marks, it’s also possible that this is an instance of predation of one hominin species by another.

Which species made and used early stone tools?

Stone tools can tell us a lot about hominins beyond just what they were eating. The presence of stone tools shows where hominins were, and coupled with hominin fossils and geological context, can shed new light on non-dietary behaviors.

A study from October uses stone tools along with butchery marked bones to expand our understanding of earlier hominin diets and ranges.

Tom Plummer and colleagues describe sites from Nyayanga, Kenya dating to around three million years ago containing Oldowan stone tools. The research expands the range of where these tools are found at the time by over 800 miles and also pushes the date for Oldowan tools back by as much as 400,000 years. These stone tools were likely used to butcher an ancient hippopotamus, as cut-marked hippo bones were found in the same layer.

Oldowan tools have traditionally been associated with the species Homo habilis , as its fossils were found at the same site as Oldowan tools in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania in 1964 . Since then, fossils of Paranthropus boisei have also been found at sites with Oldowan tools in eastern Africa, including at Olduvai Gorge. At Nyayanga, there are two Paranthropus molars in the same layer as the Oldowan tools and butchered hippo bones—but there are no Homo habilis fossils known from this excavation. Knowing which species made and used stone tools is difficult when there are multiple hominins on the landscape at the same time, but this study suggests that ruling Paranthropus out as a possible toolmaker is unwise.

Earliest use of wood for structural purposes is discovered in Zambia.

Although stone tools get much of the attention in human evolution, ancient tools were sometimes made from other materials that do not preserve as well as stone. A study published in September by Lawrence Barham and colleagues presents evidence for the oldest structural use of wood —logs used to build a structure dating to 476,000 years ago.

At Kalambo Falls in Zambia, the team excavated two interlocking wooden logs that had intentionally carved notches, as well as other wooden objects including a digging stick, a wedge and a chopped log.

Multiple stone tools were also found at the site. The waterlogged context of Kalambo Falls allowed for unusually good preservation of organic material, including wood. While tools using a single element like flaked stone or a wooden stick are fairly common and relatively simple to construct, making complex, multi-part tools, like arrowheads hafted onto spears, is much more cognitively demanding and occurs more recently in our evolutionary history.

This study suggests that the first multi-part manufactured objects may have been structures or dwellings rather than butchery tools or weapons. Considering that the earliest fossil evidence for modern humans currently dates to around 300,000 years ago, this structure was likely not made by our own species.

Ancient jewelry unravels the story of human migration and behavior.

Of course, tool use doesn’t have to be confined to purely practical purposes. Modern human cultural expression is characterized by the production and aesthetic significance of jewelry, clothing and other items. Two stories from this year use jewelry and personal adornments specifically to better unravel the story of human migration and existence.

First, a study published in July by Thais Pansani and colleagues investigates the remains of giant sloths from Santa Elina in central Brazil. At this site, abundant stone tools are intermixed with the fossils of the extinct ground sloth Glossotherium phoenesis , which grew to be 10 to 13 feet long and weighed 1.1 to 1.6 tons. These fossils include thousands of osteoderms, bony plates in the sloth’s skin similar to the armor on an armadillo, to whom sloths are closely related.

Strikingly, three of these osteoderms had holes drilled into them by humans, which, according to the authors, means they were fashioned into pendants to be worn . These drill holes were also made prior to the bones becoming fossilized, meaning that humans must have existed alongside these megafauna to have access to their fresh bones.

The dating of the oldest human activity at this site, including these giant sloth bone pendants, to around 27,000 years ago means that modern humans reached central Brazil prior to the last glacial maximum around 20,000 years ago. This study contributes to the growing body of evidence demonstrating that modern human migration into the Americas is much older than previously accepted.

A new way to extract human DNA answers the question of who wore this jewelry.

A deer tooth pendant dating from 19,000 to 25,000 years ago from Denisova Cave in Siberia, the home of the enigmatic Denisovans , as well as humans and Neanderthals, allows for the investigation of something completely different, according to this next paper from May by Elena Essel and colleagues.

This team used a nondestructive method to extract ancient DNA from objects to investigate the identity of the person that may have made or worn the object. This novel method involves gradually heating the artifact in a special solution to extract DNA that is trapped inside. From this, the researchers were able to identify the mitochondrial genomes of both the deer the tooth pendant came from and the ancient human that either wore or made the pendant.

Amazingly, the team determined that the pendant wearer was a woman belonging to a known ancient Eurasian population that was previously only thought to live in eastern Siberia.

This new method allows for great expansion of ancient DNA analyses outside of fossils and sediments, and since it’s nondestructive, it could be used on human fossils in the future. Furthermore, the successful application of this method to objects means that researchers can bridge the gap between DNA and archaeology, linking the manufacture and use of cultural and utilitarian objects to individual people.

Homo sapiens originate from two or more African paleo-populations.

This year was an exciting year for ancient DNA studies. Aaron Ragsdale and colleagues looked at the genomes of modern Africans to try to gain clues about the origins of our species, Homo sapiens .

While genetic and fossil evidence indicate that our species’ origin was in Africa, exactly how early ancient human populations interacted and contributed to living populations is less clear. This research team used DNA to work backwards in time and studied 289 modern human genomes from across Africa, including some from Great Britain as an outgroup, as well as a Croatian Neanderthal genome as an additional outgroup.

The researchers used computer modeling to suggest that our species arose from at least two African populations that interacted and interbred with each other . Fossils from these populations would likely be physically and genetically similar. This study indicates that our species did not arise from a single geographically isolated origin population in Africa.

Homo sapiens were in southeast Asia thousands of years earlier than expected.

While ancient DNA allows researchers to investigate our species’ African origins, new fossils and archaeological sites can shed light on when our ancestors migrated to new places outside of Africa. A paper published in June by Sarah Freidline and colleagues describes new fossils and dates for members of our own species Homo sapiens and found that humans reached Southeast Asia sometime between 68,000 and 86,000 years ago .

The fossils include a partial frontal bone, including brow ridge, from the cranium, and the shaft of a shin bone, from Tam Pà Ling, a cave in northern Laos. The frontal bone is remarkably slender in shape, lacking robust muscle attachments and large bony protrusions. This indicates that the individual it belonged to did not have recent admixture (interbreeding) with other, more robust populations like Neanderthals or Denisovans, but was directly descended from an ancestral Homo sapiens population in Africa or the Near East.

Interestingly, current genetic evidence points to a single successful rapid expansion of Homo sapiens out of Africa around 50,000 years ago. That would imply that this cranium, which dated to at least 67,000 years ago, may represent an earlier, failed migration of our species. More early finds like these fossils in Asia will help shed light on the details of early human expansion out of Africa.

Miocene apes evolved in more heterogeneous habitats including early grasslands.

The earliest evidence for the evolution of bipedality—walking upright on two legs—which may have enabled the earliest hominins to expand into new habitats, is from around six to seven million years ago. Originally the “savanna hypothesis” proposed this new locomotor regime was a result of looking out for predators in grasslands. Part of a more recent idea is that the evolution of bipedality is related to reaching up and eating fruit from terminal branches in trees. This new idea is driven by earlier hominin species like Ardipithecus ramidus that lived in more heavily forested habitats. A pair of papers published in April challenges even this latest narrative.

Grasses follow a distinct form of photosynthesis known as the C4 pathway, while woody vegetation, like trees and bushes, follow another, the C3 pathway. These pathways can be derived from the chemistry of fossil animal teeth and bones, which allows scientists to determine what sort of plants different animals ate, and therefore what plants were available on the landscape.

The first paper by Daniel Peppe and colleagues shows that the expansion of grasses, driven by a cooler, more arid climate, occurred in Africa about ten million years earlier than previously thought. This means that grasslands were locally abundant, creating more variable habitats outside of dense canopy forests where early apes lived.

Laura MacLatchy and colleagues in a companion paper examine the fossils of Morotopithecus , an ancient ape ancestor that lived 21 million years ago, and found that while Morotopithecus was still living in trees, it was adapted to eating leaves instead of fruit and lived in habitats with extensive grass coverage, more like a mosaic forest-grassland than a tropical rainforest.

Together, these studies provide evidence for an earlier expansion of grasslands and variable habitats that may have driven the evolution of upright torso posture in Miocene apes as early as 20 million years ago, around 12 million years before the oldest potential hominins.

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Ryan McRae | READ MORE

Dr. Ryan McRae is a paleoanthropologist studying the hominin fossil record on a macroscopic scale. He currently works for the National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program as a contractor focusing on research, education, and outreach, and is an adjunct assistant professor of anatomy at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences.

Briana Pobiner | READ MORE

Briana Pobiner is a paleoanthropologist with the National Museum of Natural History’s Human Origins Program . She lead's the program's education and outreach efforts. 

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The 2023 discoveries that made us rethink the story of human evolution

In 2023, archaeologists found evidence of architecture and art beginning earlier than we thought, and uncovered data that rewrites our ideas of how much power women had in ancient societies

By Michael Marshall

13 December 2023

Stone age paintings in Chauvet cave in France

Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology.  Sign up  to receive it in your inbox for free every month.

At this point it’s a truism that the story of human evolution is being rethought. Discoveries in recent years have forced us to rethink many crucial points, such as how old our species is –  about 300,000 years  old as opposed to 200,000 – and what extinct hominins like  the Neanderthals  were really like.

2023 was equally dizzying: discoveries continued to come thick and fast. But because there are so many species and eras involved, it’s hard to discern the common threads linking them – at least, beyond “we found out some more stuff”.

However, I do think it’s possible to draw out some overall messages from the blizzard of archaeological finds. Two things stand out to me. One is the growing evidence that many supposedly “advanced” behaviours, such as architecture and art, can be traced much further back in time than we thought, often to hominins that existed before modern humans. And the other is that we have badly misunderstood gender roles in prehistoric societies, imposing patriarchal values onto cultures that had very different ideas about how women should behave.

The ancient origins of cannabis and our changing attitudes towards it

Ancient achievements

Let’s start with architecture.  At Kalambo Falls in Zambia , researchers found buried logs that had been shaped with stone tools so that they interlocked. They seem to have once been part of a larger structure, perhaps a building. Which would be unsurprising if they weren’t 476,000 years old. That’s almost 200,000 years before our species,  Homo sapiens , evolved.

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Extinct hominins also managed to settle in extreme places. For instance, we now know that hominins like the Denisovans  lived on the frigid heights of the Tibetan plateau  200,000 years ago – upending the old notion that the plateau was only settled by modern humans around 3600 years ago.

Art also seems to have been invented by older hominins. We already had evidence that  Neanderthals painted on cave walls , and 2023 saw  more Neanderthal art  from La Roche-Cotard cave in France. Even earlier species like  Homo erectus   may also have made art , for example by engraving patterns on shells.

By far the most contentious claim in this area is that  Homo naledi  made art .  H. naledi  lived around 250,000 years ago, making it a contemporary of our species. However, it had quite a small brain, typical of older hominins – and was therefore, according to palaeoanthropological dogma, incapable of complex behaviours.

Nevertheless, in the Rising Star cave system in South Africa where the  H. naledi  remains were found, researchers have found what seem to be  etchings on the cave walls , though these have yet to be firmly dated. They also claim to have found evidence of  H. naledi  burying their dead in the cave. These assertions were the subject of a Netflix documentary,  Cave of Bones .

How did Paranthropus, the last of the ape-people, survive for so long?

Paranthropus was an ape-like hominin that lived on in a world dominated by big-brained early humans. Recent archaeological discoveries, like stone tools, are revealing how they lived

To say these claims are controversial is to understate the situation. Many researchers say the evidence presented so far is completely inadequate to support them. The dispute has only been heightened by the way the results were released, in a non-traditional journal that publishes peer reviews publicly alongside the paper.

My views on the  H. naledi  controversy are complicated. I do think more evidence is needed: in particular, I want to know how old the engravings are. At the same time, I think the species’ small brains are a distraction. Palaeoanthropologists got fixated on brain size because it was what they could see: if what you have is skeletons, then all you know about brains are their shapes and sizes. But other properties like the brain’s internal wiring are surely equally important and may explain how a species like  H. naledi  could do complicated things despite their small brains.

In a sense, we shouldn’t be surprised that so many of these behaviours had their origins in older, extinct hominins. Evolution usually works by gradual steps, and so does technology – the first birds weren’t great at flying, and the first mobile phones weren’t great at, well, anything really.

The idea that there was  a sudden explosion of intelligence and creativity  at some point in our evolution isn’t inherently ridiculous: sometimes a system hits a tipping point and undergoes runaway change. But there was never that much evidence that human evolution worked this way. Instead, it seems that  Homo erectus , the  Neanderthals  and many others all walked so we could run.

Why some medical conditions are due to evolutionary design flaws

Alternative societies

One way or another, the  H. naledi  story is going to be an example of letting our preconceptions get in the way of the evidence. The same is true for our ideas about gender in prehistory. Archaeology was invented by societies with sexist ideas, and those notions bled into the research (see also: scientific racism and homophobia). Researchers are now trying to unpick this stuff, and 2023 saw some significant steps.

Perhaps the most dramatic was the demolition of “Man the Hunter”. This was the idea, promoted for decades, that in most prehistoric societies the men went out to hunt and the women stayed home. However, a meta-analysis published in June compiled data on several dozen foraging societies and found  women hunted in 80 per cent of them . In line with this, it emerged that an ancient spear-throwing tool called an atlatl enables women to launch projectiles  at the same speed as men .

The civilisation myth: How new discoveries are rewriting human history

In an evolutionary eyeblink, our species has gone from hunting and gathering to living in complex societies. We need to rethink the story of this monumental transition

We have also seen growing evidence of women occupying positions of power in ancient societies.  The Viking queen Thyra  may have helped unify Denmark in the 900s. Going further back, an Iberian leader from around 4000 years ago  turned out to be female , not male as many had assumed, when proteins in her teeth were analysed.

So I want to end 2023 on a hopeful note.  The more we learn about past societies , the more our preconceptions about the ways society “has to be”  turn out to be wrong .  Inequality, authoritarianism and patriarchy aren’t inevitable . They’re choices, and prehistory shows us that we can choose differently.

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New genetic comparison technique developed at Stanford enables meticulous study of evolution of the human brain and face

In separate studies, researchers compared gene regulation related to brain and face development in humans and chimpanzees using a new technique. In both cases, they discovered new genetic differences between these species.

One of the best ways to study human evolution is by comparing us with nonhuman species that, evolutionarily speaking, are closely related to us. That closeness can help scientists narrow down precisely what makes us human, but that scope is so narrow it can also be extremely hard to define. To address this complication, researchers from Stanford University have developed a new technique for comparing genetic differences.

An image, from previous research, of human cortical spheroids derived in the lab of Sergiu Pașca, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. (Image credit: Timothy Archibald)

Through two separate sets of experiments with this technique, the researchers discovered new genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees. They found a significant disparity in the expression of the gene SSTR2 – which modulates the activity of neurons in the cerebral cortex and has been linked, in humans, to certain neuropsychiatric diseases such as Alzheimer’s dementia and schizophrenia – and the gene EVC2 , which is related to facial shape. The results were published March 17 in Nature and Nature Genetics , respectively.

“It’s important to study human evolution, not only to understand where we came from, but also why humans get so many diseases that aren’t seen in other species,” said Rachel Agoglia, a recent Stanford genetics graduate student who is lead author of the Nature paper.

The Nature paper details the new technique, which involves fusing human and chimpanzee skin cells that had been modified to act like stem cells – highly malleable cells that can be prodded to transform into a variety of other cell types (albeit not a full organism).

“These cells serve a very important specific purpose in this type of study by allowing us to precisely compare human and chimpanzee genes and their activities side-by-side,” said Hunter Fraser, associate professor of biology at Stanford’s  School of Humanities and Sciences . Fraser is senior author of the Nature Genetics paper and co-senior author of the Nature paper with Sergiu Pașca, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences in the Stanford  School of Medicine .

Close comparisons

The Fraser lab is particularly interested in how the genetics of humans and other primates compare at the level of cis-regulatory elements, which affect the expression of nearby genes (located on the same DNA molecule, or chromosome). The alternative – called trans-regulatory factors – can regulate the expression of distant genes on other chromosomes elsewhere in the genome. Due to their broad effects, trans-regulatory factors (such as proteins) are less likely to differ among closely related species than cis-regulatory elements.

But even when scientists have access to similar cells from humans and chimpanzees, there is a risk of confounding factors. For example, differences in the timing of development between species is a significant hurdle in studying brain development, explained Pașca. This is because human brains and chimpanzee brains develop at very different rates and there is no exact way to directly compare them. By housing human and chimpanzee DNA within the same cellular nucleus, scientists can exclude most confounding factors.

For the initial experiments using these cells, Agoglia coaxed the cells into forming so-called cortical spheroids or organoids – a bundle of brain cells that closely mimics a developing mammalian cerebral cortex. The Pașca lab has been at the forefront of developing brain organoids and assembloids for the purpose of researching how the human brain is assembled and how this process goes awry in disease.

“The human brain is essentially inaccessible at the molecular and cellular level for most of its development, so we introduced cortical spheroids to help us gain access to these important processes,” said Pașca, who is also the Bonnie Uytengsu and Family Director of Stanford Brain Organogenesis.

As the 3D clusters of brain cells develop and mature in a dish, their genetic activity mimics what happens in early neurodevelopment in each species. Because the human and chimpanzee DNA are bound together in the same cellular environment, they are exposed to the same conditions and mature in parallel. Therefore, any observed differences in the genetic activity of the two can reasonably be attributed to actual genetic differences between our two species.

Through studying brain organoids derived from the fused cells that were grown for 200 days, the researchers found thousands of genes that showed cis-regulatory differences between species. They decided to further investigate one of these genes – SSTR2 – which was more strongly expressed in human neurons and functions as a receptor for a neurotransmitter called somatostatin. In subsequent comparisons between human and chimpanzee cells, the researchers confirmed this elevated protein expression of SSTR2 in human cortical cells. Further, when the researchers exposed the chimpanzee cells and human cells to a small molecule drug that binds to SSTR2 , they found that human neurons responded much more to the drug than the chimpanzee cells.

This suggests a way by which the activity of human neurons in cortical circuits can be modified by neurotransmitters. Interestingly, this neuromodulatory activity may also be related to disease since SSTR2 has been shown to be involved in brain disease.

“Evolution of the primate brain may have involved adding sophisticated neuromodulatory features to neural circuits, which under certain conditions can be perturbed and increase susceptibility to neuropsychiatric disease,” said Pașca.

Fraser said these results are essentially “a proof of concept that the activity we’re seeing in these fused cells is actually relevant for cellular physiology.”

Investigating extreme differences

For the experiments published in Nature Genetics , the team coaxed their fused cells into cranial neural crest cells, which give rise to bones and cartilage in the skull and face, and determine facial appearance.

“We were interested in these types of cells because facial differences are considered some of the most extreme anatomical differences between humans and chimps – and these differences actually affect other aspects of our behavior and evolution, like feeding, our senses, brain expansion and speech,” said David Gokhman, a postdoctoral scholar in the Fraser lab and lead author of the Nature Genetics paper. “Also, the most common congenital diseases in humans are related to facial structure.”

In the fused cells, the researchers identified a gene expression pathway that is much more active in the chimpanzee genes of the cells than in the human genes – with one specific gene, called EVC2 , appearing to be six times more active in chimpanzees. Existing research has shown that people who have inactive EVC2 genes have flatter faces than others, suggesting that this gene could explain why humans have flatter faces than other primates.

What’s more, the researchers determined that 25 observable facial features associated with inactive EVC2 are noticeably different between humans and chimpanzees – and 23 of those are different in the direction the researchers would have predicted, given lower EVC2 activity in humans. In follow-up experiments, where the researchers reduced the activity of EVC2 in mice, the rodents, too, developed flatter faces.

Another tool in the toolbox

This new experimental platform is not intended to replace existing cell comparison studies, but the researchers hope it will support many new findings about human evolution, and evolution in general.

“Human development and the human genome have been very well studied,” said Fraser. “My lab is very interested in human evolution, but, because we can build on such a wealth of knowledge, this work can also reveal new insights into the process of evolution more broadly.”

Looking forward, the Fraser lab is working on differentiating the fused cells into other cell types, such as muscle cells, other types of neurons, skin cells and cartilage to expand their studies of uniquely human traits. The Pașca lab, meanwhile, is interested in investigating genetic dissimilarities related to astrocytes – large, multi-functional cells in the central nervous system often overlooked by scientists in favor of the flashier neurons.

“While people often think about how neurons have evolved, we should not underestimate how astrocytes have changed during evolution. The size difference alone, between human astrocytes and astrocytes in other primates, is massive,” said Pașca. “My mentor, the late Ben Barres, called astrocytes ‘the basis of humanity’ and we absolutely think he was onto something.”

Additional Stanford co-authors for the Nature paper are former research assistant Danqiong Sun, postdoctoral scholar Fikri Birey, senior research scientist Se-Jin Yoon, postdoctoral scholar Yuki Miura and former research associate Karen Sabatini.

This work was funded by a Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Seed Grant, the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Defense, the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics, the Stanford Medicine’s Dean’s Fellowship, MCHRI, the American Epilepsy Society, the Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute’s Big Idea Grants on Brain Rejuvenation and Human Brain Organogenesis, the Kwan Research Fund, the New York Stem Cell Robertson Investigator Award, and the Chan Zuckerberg Ben Barres Investigator Award.

Additional Stanford co-authors for the Nature Genetics paper are graduate student Maia Kinnebrew; former undergraduate Wei Gordon; former technician Danqiong Sun; postdoctoral research fellows Vivek Bajpai and Sahin Naqvi; Dmitri Petrov, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences; Joanna Wysocka, the Lorry Lokey Professor and professor of developmental biology; and Rajat Rohatgi, associate professor of biochemistry and of medicine. Researchers from University of California, San Francisco; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Yerkes National Primate Research Center; Emory University School of Medicine; and University of Pennsylvania are also co-authors.

This work was funded by the Human Frontier, Rothschild and Zuckerman fellowships, and the National Institutes of Health.

Fraser is a member of  Stanford Bio-X , the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI) , and the Stanford Cancer Institute . Pașca is a member of Stanford Bio-X, MCHRI and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute , and a faculty fellow of Stanford ChEM-H .

To read all stories about Stanford science, subscribe to the biweekly  Stanford Science Digest .

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New Research Unlocks Hidden Secrets of Primate Evolution

By BGI Group June 26, 2023

An international research consortium co-led by scientists from multiple universities has released a series of studies detailing new high-quality reference genomes from 50 primate species, 27 of which were sequenced for the first time. The findings offer fresh insights into primate evolution, speciation, genomic diversity, and the evolution of brain and other traits, enhancing our understanding of the human genetic architecture, primate diversification, and significant evolutionary phenomena like hybridization and incomplete lineage sorting.

Analyses of 50 primate genomes through comparative genomics unveil essential genetic processes involved in primate speciation, adaptive phenotypic changes, and the evolution of social systems.

A series of publications from the first phase program of the Primate Genome Consortium presented high-quality reference genomes from 50 primate species , including 27 that were sequenced for the first time.

The studies provide new insight into the process of speciation, genomic diversity, social evolution, the evolution of sex chromosomes, the brain, and other biological traits.

The research was co-led by Guojie Zhang from the Centre for Evolutionary & Organismal Biology at Zhejiang University, Dong-Dong Wu at the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Xiao-Guang Qi at Northwest University, Li Yu at Yunnan University, Mikkel Heide Schierup at Aarhus University , and Yang Zhou at BGI-Research.

Large-scale phylogenomic studies reveal the genetic mechanisms underlying the evolutionary history and phenotypic innovations in primates

The comparative analysis of primate genomes within a phylogenetic context is crucial for understanding the evolution of the human genetic architecture and the inter-species genomic differences associated with primate diversification. Previous studies of primate genomes have focused mainly on primate species closely related to humans and were constrained by the lack of broader phylogenetic coverage.

Genomic phylogeny of primates. Credit: Dong-Dong Wu.

“Although there are more than 500 primate species worldwide, currently, only 23 representative non-human primates species have had their genomes published, leaving 72% of genera remain unsequenced, which creates significant knowledge gaps in understanding their evolutionary history,” Dong-Dong Wu states.

To address this gap, they performed high-quality genome sequencing using long-read sequencing technologies on 27 primate species, including basal lineages that had not been fully sequenced before. Combining this with previously published primate genomes, the project conducted phylogenomic studies of 50 primate species representing 38 genera and 14 families to gain new insights into their genomic and phenotypic evolution.

“Based on full genome data, we have generated a highly resolved phylogeny and estimated the emergence of crown Primates between 64.95 and 68.29 million years ago overlapping the Cretaceous /Tertiary boundary,” Dong-Dong Wu states.

The hybrid origin of gray snub-nosed monkey. Credit: Li Yu

The study reported detailed genomic rearrangements across primate lineages and identified thousands of candidate genes that have undergone adaptive natural selection at different ancestral branches of the phylogeny. This includes genes that are important for the development of the nervous, skeletal, digestive, and sensory systems, all of which are likely to have contributed to evolutionary innovations and adaptations of primates.

“It is surprising to see that so many genomic changes involving brain-related genes occurred in the common ancestor of the Simian group which includes New-world monkey, Old-world monkey, and great apes,” states Guojie Zhang, “These genomic innovations evolving deep in time at this ancestral node might have paved the way for the further evolution of human unique traits.”

Pervasive incomplete lineage sorting illuminates speciation and selection in primates

Although it has been well-recognized that chimpanzees and bonobos are the most closely related species to humans, 15% of our genome is closer to another great ape, the gorilla. This is primarily due to the special evolutionary event called incomplete-lineage sorting (ILS), where the ancestral genetic polymorphism randomly sorts into the descendent species. The study investigated the speciation events during the primate evolution and found ILS occurred frequently in all 29 major ancestral nodes across primates with some nodes having over 50% of the genome affected by ILS.

“The genetic diversification process does not follow a bifurcation tree-like topology as we normally know for speciation process, it is more like a complicated net,” Guojie Zhang said. ”It is important to investigate the evolutionary process of each individual gene, which could also affect the evolution of phenotypes across species.”

Gray snub-nosed monkey ( Rhinopithecus brelichi ). Credit: Gui-Yun Li

Incomplete lineage sorting (ILS) exhibits extensive variation along the genome, primarily driven by recombination. “We observed that ILS is reduced more on the X chromosome than autosomes compared to what would be expected under neutral evolution, suggesting a higher impact of natural selection on the X chromosome during primate evolution,” Mikkel Heide Schierup states.

The study exploits ILS to perform molecular dating of speciation events solely based on genome data, without fossil calibration and found the new dating results were highly consistent with the dating with the fossil record. “This suggests that molecular dating provides an accurate estimate of speciation time even without the fossil records”, says the first author of this paper, Iker Rivas-González.

Hybridization into species events

Hybridization is increasingly recognized as an important evolutionary force for generating species and phenotypic diversity in plants and animals. This is especially common in lineages that can tolerate whole genome duplication and increased levels of ploidy. However, speciation by hybridization has been rarely reported in mammals.

Utilizing full genome data, the team discovered that the gray snub-nosed monkey  Rhinopithecus   brelichi  was a descendent species from the hybridization between the morphologically differentiated species, the golden snub-nosed monkey  R. roxellana  and the common ancestor of black-white snub-nosed monkey  R. bieti and the black snub-nosed monkey  R. strykeri .

Cold promotes the social evolution of the Asian langurs. Credit: Xiao-Guang Qi.

“To our knowledge, this is the first time that a hybrid speciation event is recorded in primates,” stated Li Yu.

This study further identifies key genes in R. brelichi that derived from each parental lineage which may have contributed to the mosaic coat coloration in this species and likely promoted premating reproductive isolation of the hybrid species from the parental lineage.

Multidisciplinary intersection reveals the genetic mechanisms of social complexity in Asian langurs

Primates have very diverse social systems, however, the biological mechanisms underlying social evolution remain poorly known. The classical socioecological model hypothesized that the diversity of social systems evolved as a response to environmental changes.

The study used Asian colobine monkeys as a model system, as this group of species underwent a staged social evolution process from a one-male, multi-female unit to complex multi-level social forms. They have re-constructed the speciation process of this group using the full genome data and found a strong correlation between the environmental temperature and the group size of the species.

The primate species living in colder environments tend to live in larger groups. The ancient ice ages drove the social evolution of these primates, promoting the aggregation of spreading northern odd-nosed monkey species into nested multi-level social forms.

During this transition, odd-nosed monkeys exhibited positive selection in many genes related to cold adaptation and the nervous system. “The snub-nosed monkeys seem to have a longer mother-infant bond, which probably increased infant survival in cold environments, The DA/OXT receptors are important neurohormones in mediating social bonding. This signal pathway has been enhanced in odd-nosed monkeys and promoted the social affiliation, cohesion, and cooperation among adults of this species,” Xiao-Guang Qi states.

References: “Phylogenomic analyses provide insights into primate evolution” by Yong Shao, Long Zhou, Fang Li, Lan Zhao, Bao-Lin Zhang, Feng Shao, Jia-Wei Chen, Chun-Yan Chen, Xupeng Bi, Xiao-Lin Zhuang, Hong-Liang Zhu, Jiang Hu, Zongyi Sun, Xin Li, Depeng Wang, Iker Rivas-González, Sheng Wang, Yun-Mei Wang, Wu Chen, Gang Li, Hui-Meng Lu, Yang Liu, Lukas F. K. Kuderna, Kyle Kai-How Farh, Peng-Fei Fan, Li Yu, Ming Li, Zhi-Jin Liu, George P. Tiley, Anne D. Yoder, Christian Roos, Takashi Hayakawa, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Jeffrey Rogers, Peter D. Stenson, David N. Cooper, Mikkel Heide Schierup, Yong-Gang Yao, Ya-Ping Zhang, Wen Wang, Xiao-Guang Qi, Guojie Zhang and Dong-Dong Wu, 1 June 2023, Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.abn6919

“Pervasive incomplete lineage sorting illuminates speciation and selection in primates” by Iker Rivas-González, Marjolaine Rousselle, Fang Li, Long Zhou, Julien Y. Dutheil, Kasper Munch, Yong Shao, Dongdong Wu, Mikkel H. Schierup and Guojie Zhang, 2 June 2023, Science . DOI: 10.1126/science.abn4409

“Hybrid origin of a primate, the gray snub-nosed monkey” by Hong Wu, Zefu Wang, Yuxing Zhang, Laurent Frantz, Christian Roos, David M. Irwin, Chenglin Zhang, Xuefeng Liu, Dongdong Wu, Song Huang, Tongtong Gu, Jianquan Liu and Li Yu, 2 June 2023, Science . DOI: 10.1126/science.abl4997

“Adaptations to a cold climate promoted social evolution in Asian colobine primates” by Xiao-Guang Qi, Jinwei Wu, Lan Zhao, Lu Wang, Xuanmin Guang, Paul A. Garber, Christopher Opie, Yuan Yuan, Runjie Diao, Gang Li, Kun Wang, Ruliang Pan, Weihong Ji, Hailu Sun, Zhi-Pang Huang, Chunzhong Xu, Arief B. Witarto, Rui Jia, Chi Zhang, Cheng Deng, Qiang Qiu, Guojie Zhang, Cyril C. Grueter, Dongdong Wu and Baoguo Li, 2 June 2023, Science . DOI: 10.1126/science.abl8621

“The landscape of tolerated genetic variation in humans and primates” by Hong Gao, Tobias Hamp, Jeffrey Ede, Joshua G. Schraiber, Jeremy McRae, Moriel Singer-Berk, Yanshen Yang, Anastasia S. D. Dietrich, Petko P. Fiziev, Lukas F. K. Kuderna, Laksshman Sundaram, Yibing Wu, Aashish Adhikari, Yair Field, Chen Chen, Serafim Batzoglou, Francois Aguet, Gabrielle Lemire, Rebecca Reimers, Daniel Balick, Mareike C. Janiak, Martin Kuhlwilm, Joseph D. Orkin, Shivakumara Manu, Alejandro Valenzuela, Juraj Bergman, Marjolaine Rousselle, Felipe Ennes Silva, Lidia Agueda, Julie Blanc, Marta Gut, Dorien de Vries, Ian Goodhead, R. Alan Harris, Muthuswamy Raveendran, Axel Jensen, Idriss S. Chuma, Julie E. Horvath, Christina Hvilsom, David Juan, Peter Frandsen, Fabiano R. de Melo, Fabrício Bertuol, Hazel Byrne, Iracilda Sampaio, Izeni Farias, João Valsecchi do Amaral, Mariluce Messias, Maria N. F. da Silva, Mihir Trivedi, Rogerio Rossi, Tomas Hrbek, Nicole Andriaholinirina, Clément J. Rabarivola, Alphonse Zaramody, Clifford J. Jolly, Jane Phillips-Conroy, Gregory Wilkerson, Christian Abee, Joe H. Simmons, Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, Sree Kanthaswamy, Fekadu Shiferaw, Dongdong Wu, Long Zhou, Yong Shao, Guojie Zhang, Julius D. Keyyu, Sascha Knauf, Minh D. Le, Esther Lizano, Stefan Merker, Arcadi Navarro, Thomas Bataillon, Tilo Nadler, Chiea Chuen Khor, Jessica Lee, Patrick Tan, Weng Khong Lim, Andrew C. Kitchener, Dietmar Zinner, Ivo Gut, Amanda Melin, Katerina Guschanski, Mikkel Heide Schierup, Robin M. D. Beck, Govindhaswamy Umapathy, Christian Roos, Jean P. Boubli, Monkol Lek, Shamil Sunyaev, Anne O’Donnell-Luria, Heidi L. Rehm, Jinbo Xu, Jeffrey Rogers, Tomas Marques-Bonet and Kyle Kai-How Farh, 2 June 2023, Science . DOI: 10.1126/science.abn8197

“A global catalog of whole-genome diversity from 233 primate species” by Lukas F. K. Kuderna, Hong Gao, Mareike C. Janiak, Martin Kuhlwilm, Joseph D. Orkin, Thomas Bataillon, Shivakumara Manu, Alejandro Valenzuela, Juraj Bergman, Marjolaine Rousselle, Felipe Ennes Silva, Lidia Agueda, Julie Blanc, Marta Gut, Dorien de Vries, Ian Goodhead, R. Alan Harris, Muthuswamy Raveendran, Axel Jensen, Idrissa S. Chuma, Julie E. Horvath, Christina Hvilsom, David Juan, Peter Frandsen, Joshua G. Schraiber, Fabiano R. de Melo, Fabrício Bertuol, Hazel Byrne, Iracilda Sampaio, Izeni Farias, João Valsecchi, Malu Messias, Maria N. F. da Silva, Mihir Trivedi, Rogerio Rossi, Tomas Hrbek, Nicole Andriaholinirina, Clément J. Rabarivola, Alphonse Zaramody, Clifford J. Jolly, Jane Phillips-Conroy, Gregory Wilkerson, Christian Abee, Joe H. Simmons, Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, Sree Kanthaswamy, Fekadu Shiferaw, Dongdong Wu, Long Zhou, Yong Shao, Guojie Zhang, Julius D. Keyyu, Sascha Knauf, Minh D. Le, Esther Lizano, Stefan Merker, Arcadi Navarro, Tilo Nadler, Chiea Chuen Khor, Jessica Lee, Patrick Tan, Weng Khong Lim, Andrew C. Kitchener, Dietmar Zinner, Ivo Gut, Amanda D. Melin, Katerina Guschanski, Mikkel Heide Schierup, Robin M. D. Beck, Govindhaswamy Umapathy, Christian Roos, Jean P. Boubli, Jeffrey Rogers, Kyle Kai-How Farh and Tomas Marques Bonet, 1 June 2023, Science . DOI: 10.1126/science.abn7829

“Genome-wide coancestry reveals details of ancient and recent male-driven reticulation in baboons” by Erik F. Sørensen, R. Alan Harris, Liye Zhang, Muthuswamy Raveendran, Lukas F. K. Kuderna, Jerilyn A. Walker, Jessica M. Storer, Martin Kuhlwilm, Claudia Fontsere, Lakshmi Seshadri, Christina M. Bergey, Andrew S. Burrell, Juraj Bergman, Jane E. Phillips-Conroy, Fekadu Shiferaw, Kenneth L. Chiou, Idrissa S. Chuma, Julius D. Keyyu, Julia Fischer, Marie-Claude Gingras, Sejal Salvi, Harshavardhan Doddapaneni, Mikkel H. Schierup, Mark A. Batzer, Clifford J. Jolly, Sascha Knauf, Dietmar Zinner, Kyle K.-H. Farh, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Kasper Munch, Christian Roos and Jeffrey Rogers, 2 June 2023, Science . DOI: 10.1126/science.abn8153

“Rare penetrant mutations confer severe risk of common diseases” by Petko P. Fiziev, Jeremy McRae, Jacob C. Ulirsch, Jacqueline S. Dron, Tobias Hamp, Yanshen Yang, Pierrick Wainschtein, Zijian Ni, Joshua G. Schraiber, Hong Gao, Dylan Cable, Yair Field, Francois Aguet, Marc Fasnacht, Ahmed Metwally, Jeffrey Rogers, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Heidi L. Rehm, Anne O’Donnell-Luria, Amit V. Khera and Kyle Kai-How Farh, 2 June 2023, Science . DOI: 10.1126/science.abo1131

“Comparative genomics reveals the hybrid origin of a macaque group” by Bao-Lin Zhang, Wu Chen, Zefu Wang, Wei Pang, Meng-Ting Luo, Sheng Wang, Yong Shao, Wen-Qiang He, Yuan Deng, Long Zhou, Jiawei Chen, Min-Min Yang, Yajiang Wu, Lu Wang, Hugo Fernández-Bellon, Sandra Molloy, Hélène Meunier, Fanélie Wanert, Lukas Kuderna, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Christian Roos, Xiao-Guang Qi, Ming Li, Zhijin Liu, Mikkel Heide Schierup, David N. Cooper, Jianquan Liu, Yong-Tang Zheng, Guojie Zhang and Dong-Dong Wu, 1 June 2023, Science Advances . DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.add3580

“Lineage-specific accelerated sequences underlying primate evolution” by Xupeng Bi, Long Zhou, Jin-Jin Zhang, Shaohong Feng, Mei Hu, David N. Cooper, Jiangwei Lin, Jiali Li, Dong-Dong Wu and Guojie Zhang, 1 June 2023, Science Advances . DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adc9507

“Eighty million years of rapid evolution of the primate Y chromosome” by Yang Zhou, Xiaoyu Zhan, Jiazheng Jin, Long Zhou, Juraj Bergman, Xuemei Li, Marjolaine Marie C. Rousselle, Meritxell Riera Belles, Lan Zhao, Miaoquan Fang, Jiawei Chen, Qi Fang, Lukas Kuderna, Tomas Marques-Bonet, Haruka Kitayama, Takashi Hayakawa, Yong-Gang Yao, Huanming Yang, David N. Cooper, Xiaoguang Qi, Dong-Dong Wu, Mikkel Heide Schierup and Guojie Zhang, 2 June 2023, Nature Ecology & Evolution . DOI: 10.1038/s41559-022-01974-x

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Groundbreaking Discovery Rewrites Our Understanding of Whale Evolution

New findings underscore the vital importance of the australian fossil record to global scientific knowledge.

Groundbreaking new research from the Museums Victoria Research Institute has turned upside down our previous understanding of the evolution of the largest animals ever––baleen whales. 

Paleontologists Dr. James Rule (Monash University and Natural History Museum, London) and Dr. Erich Fitzgerald (Museums Victoria Research Institute) have co-authored the open access paper “Giant baleen whales emerged from a cold southern cradle,” published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B .

Until now, it was believed that the beginning of the Ice Age in the Northern Hemisphere about 3 million years ago kickstarted the evolution of truly gigantic baleen whales. 

The new findings reveal that in fact this evolutionary leap in size happened as early as 20 million years ago and at the polar opposite, in the Southern Hemisphere. 

The major discovery came from research into a fossil cared for in the Museums Victoria collection—the front end of the lower jaw of an unusually large and ancient whale aged between 21–16 million years old. The fossil was recovered from a cliff face on the bank of the Murray River in South Australia in 1921 but was largely unrecognized in the collection until Fitzgerald realized its significance about a decade ago as the largest baleen whale known to be alive at that time. 

In the paper, Rule and Fitzgerald working with a team from Australia and New Zealand show how whales evolved into gigantic sizes first in the Southern Hemisphere, not the Northern, and have had larger body sizes in the South for their entire evolutionary history—some 20–30 million years. 

The new findings underscore the vital importance of the Australian and wider Southern Hemisphere fossil record for piecing together the global picture of whale evolution. The previous ruling hypothesis was based on fossils primarily found in the Northern Hemisphere, but the Murray River whale fossil disrupts that theory.

“The Southern Hemisphere, and Australia in particular, have always been over-looked frontiers for fossil whale discovery,” explains Fitzgerald. “Fossil whale finds in the South, like the Murray River whale, are shaking up the evolution of whales into a more accurate, truly global picture of what was going on in the oceans long ago.”

In their research Rule and Fitzgerald discovered that the tip of the baleen whale jaw is scalable with body size. They estimated the length of this baleen whale to be around 9 meters. 

“The largest whales alive today, such as the blue whale, reach the length of a basketball court,” says Rule. “Around 19 million years ago the Murray River whale, at 9 meters long, was already a third of this length. So, baleen whales were well on their way to evolving into ocean giants.” 

Factors including the great freezing of Antarctica, changes in ocean currents, and explosion of plankton biomass drove the evolution of colossal whales in the South long before they reached their huge size in the Northern Hemisphere. 

Home to Australia's largest collection of whale fossil specimens, the Museums Victoria Research Institute is at the forefront of whale evolution research and plans are already underway for research into other whale fossil items in the collection. An ongoing flagship project, Raising Leviathan, is focused on whale evolution and includes plans to involve the local community of citizen scientists in extracting the largest ever fossil found in Melbourne, an as-yet unidentified species of whale, located in Beaumaris. Museums Victoria welcomes donations from our valued supporters and the wider community to help us realize our ambitions to deliver breakthrough research and connect the community with credible scientific knowledge to drive transformational understanding of our thriving planet. 

“Today’s revelation from Museums Victoria Research Institute and our partners reshapes whale evolution history, affirming our commitment to world-leading research. The Murray River fossil highlights our institute’s role in solving real-world problems, contributing new knowledge, and leading in whale evolution research,” said Lynley Crosswell, CEO of Museums Victoria.

- This press release was provided by the Museums Victoria Research Institute

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• 08 April 2024

Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?

• Jonathan R. Goodman 0

Jonathan R. Goodman is a research associate at Cambridge Public Health, University of Cambridge, UK. His first book, Invisible Rivals , will be published in 2025.

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Humpback whales often forage in groups, which can help to corral the small crustaceans that they feed on. Credit: Tony Wu/NPL/SPL

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Selfish Genes to Social Beings: A Cooperative History of Life Jonathan Silvertown Oxford Univ. Press (2024)

The fact that all life evolved thanks to natural selection can have depressing connotations. If ‘survival of the fittest’ is the key to evolution, are humans hardwired for conflict with one another? Not at all, says evolutionary biologist Jonathan Silvertown in his latest book, Selfish Genes to Social Beings . On the contrary, he argues, many phenomena in the natural world, from certain types of predation to parasitism, rely on cooperation. Thus “we need no longer fret that human nature is sinful or fear that the milk of human kindness will run dry”.

Silvertown uses examples from genes, bacteria, fungi, plants and animals to emphasize that cooperation is ubiquitous in nature. For instance, bacteria called rhizobia thrive in the root nodules of legumes — and turn nitrogen from the air into a soluble form that the plants can use. Some beetles cooperate to bury animal corpses that would be too large for any single insect to manage alone, both reducing the risk of other animals stealing food and providing a nest for beetle families to live in.

It’s time to admit that genes are not the blueprint for life

And many bacteria indicate their presence to each other using a chemical-signalling system called quorum sensing, which is active only when members of the same species are tightly packed together. This allows each cell to adjust its gene expression in a way that benefits the individuals in the group — to release a poison to kill other species, for instance, when enough bacteria are clustered together to mount a decent attack.

Even eighteenth-century piracy, says Silvertown, is a good example of effective cooperation. Pirates worked together on their ships, and used violence more often against outsiders than as an internal mechanism for law enforcement.

The author argues against the idea that cooperation is fundamentally at odds with competition — a view that emerged as a consequence of the sociobiology movement of the 1970s, in which some biologists argued that all human behaviour is reducible to a Darwinian need to be the ‘fittest’. The reality, as Silvertown shows, is not black and white.

Lichen is a composite organism, in which an alga lives within a fungus. Credit: Ashley Cooper/SPL

A matter of perspective

Take lichens, for instance — ‘composite organisms’ in which an alga or cyanobacterium lives within a fungus. The Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener, who discovered this relationship in the 1860s, argued that a lichen is a parasite: “Its slaves are green algals, which it has sought out or indeed caught hold of, and forced into its service.” Another way to view the relationship is that these algae and fungi are co-dependent — when they co-exist as a lichen, each grows better than it would alone. The line between parasitism and mutualism, competition and cooperation is not clear cut. It’s a matter of perspective.

A ‘user’s manual for the female mammal — how women’s bodies evolved

Similarly hazy boundaries are found in the biology of our own cells. More than a billion years ago, cells absorbed bacteria, which eventually evolved into structures called mitochondria that generate energy. Mitochondria are an essential part of the cells of all plants, animals and fungi alive today. They could be considered slaves, with cells the parasites. Or perhaps they are more like adopted family members.

Fundamentally, Silvertown proposes, cooperation in each of these situations stems from selfishness. Animals did not evolve to act for the benefit of their species, but to spread their own genes. Cooperation happens because mutual benefits are better, biologically speaking, than working alone, as the case of lichens effectively demonstrates.

If this seems heartless, it’s a reflection of the human tendency to apply human moral frameworks to biological phenomena. The use of emotionally charged words such as ‘slave’ and ‘adopted’ takes us away from rigorous science and leads us to see biological interactions as ‘good’ or ‘bad’, rather than as the morally agnostic, transactional processes that they truly are.

Why reciprocity is common in humans but rare in other animals

The anthropomorphizing of biological processes is a deep and current problem. The tendency to falsely imply agency in the natural world is an easy trap to fall into — consider how often people might say that a virus such as SARS-CoV-2 ‘wants’ to be transmitted, for instance, or that ants act ‘for the good of their colony’. I would have liked to hear more about Silvertown’s views on this category error. But in places, I felt that he could have made his implied understanding more explicit. Instead, he sometimes sacrifices that carefulness for unnecessary jokes, noting, for instance, that bacteria “are essentially singletons who like to party”.

The author could also have talked more about how the amorality inherent in most of the natural world does not apply to humans. Similarly to other organisms, our evolutionary heritage makes us social, but whether that sociality is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ is a moral, not a scientific, question. This distinction from the other cooperative processes that Silvertown outlines could have been explained better.

Selfish Genes to Social Beings is at its best in the long, fascinating discussions of the complexity of cooperative behaviours across the natural world. For instance, although I’ve read a lot about biology, before reading this book I could never understand how RNA chains might have joined together and started the process of self-replication through which all life evolved. Silvertown can talk as easily about the compounds making up your genes as most people can about yesterday’s football match.

Nature 628 , 260-261 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00999-5

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

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A Q&A with WALS Lecturer Jenny Tung on her research with primates and advice for aspiring scientists

The NIH Director’s Wednesday Afternoon Lecture Series, colloquially known as WALS, is the highest-profile lecture program at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The speakers are some of the most prominent biomedical and behavioral scientists and are nominated by staff from across the National Institutes of Health.

The Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) is honored that our nominee, Jenny Tung, Ph.D., was selected this year. She will be the featured WALS Speaker on May 1, 2024, at 2:00 p.m. ET . Please save the date and plan to join us virtually or in person. No registration is necessary.

Dr. Tung is the Director of the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, and a Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology and Biology at Duke University. She founded the Department of Primate Behavior and Evolution at MPI-EVA in 2022. Research in the department focuses on the intersection between behavior, social structure, and genes. Dr. Tung’s lab is particularly interested in how the social environment influences gene regulation, population genetic structure, and health and survival across the life course.

As we look forward to her lecture on May 1, we asked Dr. Tung to share a little bit about her background, career, and research.

1. What initially drew you to studying the social life and health of primates?

I am fascinated by the importance of social relationships in our lives—friendly, antagonistic, or some mixture of both—and so have always gravitated towards work that seeks to understand social interactions.

Early in college, I took a course in evolutionary anthropology that introduced primate studies—particularly long-term field studies, where individuals could be followed from birth to death—as a method to get at these questions. It taught me that social behaviors could not only be measured, but their origins understood within the well-developed framework of evolutionary thinking—which in turn is directly connected to their consequences for health, survival, and reproduction.

2. What are some of the most important findings from your work? Has anything surprised you?

Our work has repeatedly revealed that analogues of the major social determinants of health in humans—early life adversity, social isolation, low social status—are also extraordinarily powerful predictors of life outcomes in other primates, including in unmanipulated natural populations. For example, we find that social isolation predicts 2–3 years of shortened adult lifespan in wild female baboons; early life adversity can shorten lifespan by up to a decade.

In one sense, these very large effects should perhaps not be surprising. After all, humans share millions of years of evolutionary history and a lot of physiological similarities with other primates. But there is always a question about whether the human case is qualitatively different—because of our complex modern societies, or our cognitive sophistication, or something else. So, I’ve been a little surprised nonetheless—in part pleasantly so, in the sense that these parallels create valuable opportunities to study nonhuman primates (and other social mammals) to understand behavioral and social factors that influence health in humans.

3. How can we apply the insights from your research to improve human health and influence human behavior?

One of the difficult questions about the social determinants of health in humans, I think, is the causality question: can social factors per se really influence how our bodies function, or is it all confounded by health care access, diet, toxin exposure, etc.? I think some of the important takeaways from our work for human health is where we show—this is most clearly done in our experimental studies—that controlled changes to the social environment by themselves have downstream consequences for social behavior, stress physiology, and even the regulation of the cells in our immune system and the response to vaccines.

In our studies in wild primates, we show how social and early life adversity can have long-term consequences in the next generation and suggest a simple explanation based on the lasting effects of early adversity on maternal condition. Both types of studies don’t immediately test interventions, but they help with the work of identifying the levers that might be most important to pull.

4. What were some key decision points in your career? What factors went into the choices you eventually made?

A very important decision point was choosing to work with my former thesis advisor and now long-standing collaborator, Susan Alberts. By doing so, I not only got fantastic training and mentorship, but also the opportunity to start working with the Amboseli Baboon Research Project (ABRP), one of the longest-running field sites on wild primates in the world. The life course data available for ABRP spans up to nine or ten generations now, based on granular, near-daily observations: it is a treasure trove for understanding how and why social interactions influence life outcomes, and for biodemographic studies in general. My close collaborations with Susan and my other ABRP co-directors, Jeanne Altmann and Beth Archie, have also been tremendously personally and professionally rewarding.

A second important decision point was starting my faculty job at Duke through an interdisciplinary hire led by the Duke Population Research Institute (DUPRI). Most members of DUPRI are social scientists, but we share interests in life course studies, biodemography, and the social determinants of health. My colleagues there, especially Angie O’Rand and Seth Sanders, and also Kathie Mullan Harris at UNC’s Carolina Population Center, helped introduce me to entirely new ideas, data sets, and ways of thinking about these topics, which have been very valuable in developing my research program over the years.

5. What challenges have you faced in your training and career? How have you addressed and perhaps grown from them?

In general, I have felt very fortunate in my training and career: I had wonderful mentors and colleagues during my training experience, and they form a part of my extended scientific and personal network today. A challenge that’s on my mind a lot these days is the difficulty, though, of being far from my support network, especially my immediate family.

My research reminds me a lot about the importance of social support, but in academics, moving around and following your career, traveling a lot, means that there’s often just not a lot of net to catch you. And this job, as stimulating and wonderful as it is, means that there’s always a long to-do list, people you want to support, obligations to meet. It’s easy to convince myself that there’s no room for slack. But I suppose one thing I can say I’ve learned is that, when you needed to ask for it—people are often more understanding than you might fear.

6. Any words of advice you have for trainees seeking a career in science?

Find collaborators you love working with and hold on to them—they will enrich your life scientifically and personally in a unique and special way. Everyone needs people they trust to whom they can ask “dumb questions.”

Don’t accidentally trap yourself into disciplinary silos. Talk to anyone, regardless of discipline, who is interested in talking to you. Sometimes it’s just a one-off conversation, but sometimes it makes a new connection or opens a new research direction.

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Study shedding new light on Earth's global carbon cycle could help assess liveability of other planets

Research has uncovered important new insights into the evolution of oxygen, carbon, and other vital elements over the entire history of Earth – and it could help assess which other planets can develop life, ranging from plants to animals and humans.

The study, published today in Nature Geoscience and led by a researcher at the University of Bristol, reveals for the first time how the build up of carbon-rich rocks has accelerated oxygen production and its release into the atmosphere. Until now the exact nature of how the atmosphere became oxygen-rich has long eluded scientists and generated conflicting explanations.

As carbon dioxide is steadily emitted by volcanoes, it ends up entering the ocean and forming rocks like limestone. As global stocks of these rocks build up they can then release their carbon during tectonic processes, including mountain building and metamorphism.

Using this knowledge, the scientists built a unique sophisticated computer model to more accurately chart key changes in the carbon, nutrient and oxygen cycles deep into Earth’s history, over 4 billion years of the planet’s lifetime.

Lead author and biogeochemist Dr Lewis Alcott, Lecturer in Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, said: “This breakthrough is important and exciting because it may help us understand how planets, other than Earth, have the potential to support intelligent, oxygen-breathing life.

“Previously we didn’t have a clear idea of why oxygen rose from very low concentrations to present-day concentrations, as computer models haven’t previously been able to accurately simulate all the possible feedbacks together. This has puzzled scientists for decades and created different theories.”

The discovery indicates that older planets, originating billions of years ago like Earth, may have better prospects to accumulate enough carbon-rich deposits in their crust, which could facilitate rapid recycling of carbon and nutrients for life.

The findings showed this gradual carbon enrichment of the crust results in ever-increasing recycling rates of carbon and various minerals, including the nutrients needed for photosynthesis, the process green plants use sunlight to absorb nutrients from carbon dioxide and water. This cycle therefore steadily speeds up oxygen production over the passage of Earth’s history.

The research, which started whilst Dr Alcott was a Hutchinson Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University in the United States, paves the way for future work to further unravel the complex interrelationships between planetary temperature, oxygen, and nutrients.

Co-author Prof Benjamin Mills, Professor of Earth System Evolution at the University of Leeds, said: “We have lots of information about distant stars and the size of the planets that orbit them. Soon this could be used to make a prediction of the planet’s potential chemistry, and new advances in telescope technology should let us know if we are correct."

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• Lewis J. Alcott, Craig Walton, Noah J. Planavsky, Oliver Shorttle, Benjamin J. W. Mills. Crustal carbonate build-up as a driver for Earth’s oxygenation . Nature Geoscience , 2024; DOI: 10.1038/s41561-024-01417-1

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New sunflower family tree reveals multiple origins of flower symmetry

T he sunflower family tree has revealed that flower symmetry evolved multiple times independently, a process called convergent evolution, among the members of this large plant family, according to a new analysis. The research team, led by a Penn State biologist, resolved more of the finer branches of the family tree, providing insight into how the sunflower family—which includes asters, daisies and food crops like lettuce and artichoke—evolved.

A paper describing the analysis and findings, which researchers said may help identify useful traits to selectively breed plants with more desirable characteristics, appears in the journal Plant Communication .

"Convergent evolution describes the independent evolution of what appears to be the same trait in different species, like wings in birds and bats," said Hong Ma, Huck Chair in Plant Reproductive Development and Evolution, professor of biology in the Eberly College of Science at Penn State and the leader of the research team. "This can make it difficult to determine how closely related two species are by comparing their traits, so having a detailed family tree based on DNA sequence is crucial to understanding how and when these traits evolved."

The sunflower head, for example, is actually a composite composed of multiple much smaller flowers. While the head is generally radially symmetric—it can be divided into two equal halves in multiple directions like a starfish or a pie—the individual flowers can have different forms of symmetry. According to the new study, bilateral symmetry—where there is only one line that divides the flower into two equal halves—has evolved and been lost multiple times independently in sunflowers over evolutionary history. The researchers found that this convergent evolution is likely related to changes in the number of copies and the expression patterns of the floral regulatory gene, CYC2.

In recent years, many family trees for a group of related species have been built by extensively using transcriptomes, which are the genetic sequences of essentially all of the genes expressed by a species, the researchers explained. Transcriptomes are easier to acquire than high-quality whole-genome sequences for a species but are still difficult and costly to prepare and require fresh plant samples. To increase the number of species available for comparison the team turned to low-coverage genome sequences, which are produced through a process called genome skimming and are relatively inexpensive and easy to prepare, even from dried plant samples.

"To get an accurate whole-genome sequence for a species, each letter of its DNA alphabet must be read—or covered—multiple times to minimize errors," Ma said. "For the purposes of building a family tree, we show in this paper that we can get away with lower coverage genome sequences. This allowed us to increase the number of species in our analysis, which in turn allowed us to resolve more of the finer branches on the sunflower family tree."

The team used a combination of publicly available and newly generated transcriptomes, along with a large number of newly obtained skimmed genomes, for a total of 706 species with representatives from 16 subfamilies, 41 tribes and 144 subtribe-level groups in the sunflower family. The subfamilies are major subdivisions of the family, while the tribes and subtribe can contain one or more of genera, which is the classification level just above the species.

"Previous versions of the sunflower family tree had established the relationships among most of the subfamilies and many tribes, which are equivalent to the main branches of a tree," Ma said. "With our increased sample size, we were able to resolve more of the smaller branches and twigs at the subtribe and genus level. This higher-resolution tree allowed us to reconstruct where and when traits like flower symmetry evolved, demonstrating that bilateral symmetry must have evolved many times independently."

The team also studied the molecular evolution of genes involved in flower development among sunflowers. They found that one of these genes, CYC2, which is found in multiple copies in the genomes of each species, was activated in species with bilaterally symmetric flowers, suggesting that it might be part of the molecular basis for the convergent evolution of this trait. To further test this, the team performed experiments to quantify CYC2 gene expression in the flowers of species with different types of symmetry.

"Our analysis showed a clear relationship between CYC2 expression and flower symmetry, suggesting that changes in how these genes are used in various sunflower species is likely involved in the convergent evolution observed in the family," Ma said. "The sunflower family is one of the two largest families of flowering plants containing over 28,000 species, including many economically important agricultural and horticultural species. Understanding how these species are related to one another allows us to determine how and when their traits evolved. This knowledge could also be used to identify useful traits that could be bred into domesticated species from closely related wild ones."

In addition to Ma, the research team includes Guojin Zhang at Penn State; Junbo Yang, Jie Cai, Zhi-Rong Zhang and Lian-Ming Gao at the Kunming Institute of Botany in Kunming, China; Caifei Zhang at the Wuhan Botanical Garden and Sino-Africa Joint Research Centre in Wuhan, China; Bohan Jiao and Tiangang Gao at the State Key Laboratory of Plant Diversity and Specialty Crops in Beijing, China; and Jose L. Panero at the University of Texas, Austin.

More information: Guojin Zhang et al, Nuclear phylogenomics of Asteraceae with increased sampling provides new insights into convergent morphological and molecular evolution, Plant Communications (2024). DOI: 10.1016/j.xplc.2024.100851

Provided by Pennsylvania State University

Doctoral candidate Karmen Yu recently presented findings from her dissertation study at the annual Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education conference in Omaha, NE. Karmen’s talk, entitled Case Studies of Undergraduate Students’ Agentive Participation in the Parallel Spaces of Calculus I Coursework and Peer-Led, Inquiry-Oriented, Complementary Instruction.  She shared findings from one case study that included characterizations of the different forms of agentive participation afforded to students in each of the two spaces, as well as their complementary nature relative to learning calculus with understanding. It was a fantastic presentation. Karmen’s advisor, Dr. Steven Greenstein, was a contributor to the presentation and was there to support her. Great work, Karmen!

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What are the key findings of the NHS gender identity review?

Report by Dr Hilary Cass finds young people being let down by lack of research and evidence on medical interventions

• Thousands of children ‘let down by NHS’
• Review has major implications for mental health services

A review into the NHS’s gender identity services has found that children and young people have been let down by a lack of research and evidence on medical interventions in a debate that has become exceptionally toxic.

Dr Hilary Cass said her report was not about defining “what it means to be trans” or “undermining the validity of trans identities”, but about “how best to help the growing number of children and young people who are looking for support from the NHS in relation to their gender identity”. Here are the review’s key findings.

The evidence

“This is an area of remarkably weak evidence,” Cass writes in the foreword to her 398-page report.

Despite that, she adds: “Results of studies are exaggerated or misrepresented by people on all sides of the debate to support their viewpoint. The reality is that we have no good evidence on the long-term outcomes of interventions to manage gender-related distress.”

When Cass began her inquiry in 2020, the evidence base, especially about puberty blockers and masculinising and feminising cross-sex hormones was “weak”. That was exacerbated by the existence of “a lot of misinformation, easily accessible online, with opposing sides of the debate pointing to research to justify a position, regardless of the quality of the studies.”

Cass commissioned the University of York to undertake systematic reviews of the evidence on key issues, such as puberty blockers. It found that “there continues to be a lack of high-quality evidence in this area”. York academics, as part of their research, tried to document the outcomes seen among the 9,000 young people who the Tavistock and Portman NHS trust’s gender identity development service (Gids) treated between 2009-2020. However, it was “thwarted by a lack of cooperation from [six of England’s seven NHS] adult gender services”.

The new NHS services for these young people must routinely collect evidence of what treatments work, and learn from them to improve clinical practice, the report states.

Cass acknowledges that the discussion around how to care for such young people is polarised, both among health professionals and in wider society. For example, some clinicians believe that most people who present to gender services “will go on to have a long-term trans identity and should be supported to access a medical pathway at an early stage”.

“Others feel that we are medicalising children and young people whose multiple other difficulties are manifesting through gender confusion and gender-related distress. The toxicity of the debate is exceptional,” the report says.

Cass has been criticised for talking both to groups who support gender affirmation – the medical approach – and also those who believe greater caution is needed. Some experienced doctors who have offered different viewpoints have been “dismissed and invalidated”, she says.

“There are few other areas of healthcare where professionals are so afraid to openly discuss their views, where people are vilified on social media and where name-calling echoes the worst bullying behaviour. This must stop.”

The toxicity of debate has made some clinicians fearful of working with these young people.

The Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust

When its Gids service was set up in 1989, it saw fewer than 10 children a year, mainly birth-registered males who had not reached puberty. Most received therapy and only a few hormones from the age of 16.

But in 2011 the UK began trialling the use of puberty blockers, as a result of the emergence of “the Dutch protocol”, which involved using them from early puberty. However, a study undertaken in 2015-16, although not published until 2020, shows “a lack of any positive measurable outcomes”.

“Despite this, from 2014 puberty blockers moved from a research-only protocol to being available in routine clinical practice.” This “adoption of a treatment with uncertain benefits without further scrutiny” helped increase the demand among patients for them, the report finds.

An NHS England review in 2019, which examined the evidence on medical intervention and found evidence of its effectiveness to be “weak”, led to Cass being asked to undertake her review.

Changing patient profile

Referral rates to Gids have rocketed since 2014, but there has also been a shift in the profile of those using services. For centuries transgender people have been predominantly trans females who present in adulthood. Now the vast majority are teenagers who were registered as female at birth.

An audit of discharge notes of Gids patients between 1 April 2018 and 31 December 2022 showed the youngest patient was three, the oldest 18, and 73% were birth-registered females, according to the review, which tries to discover why things have changed so dramatically.

One area it explores is the deterioration in mental health among young people, and the links with social media, which have brought pressures to bear on them that no previous generation has experienced.

“The increase in presentations to gender clinics has to some degree paralleled this deterioration in child and adolescent mental health,” the review says. “Mental health problems have risen in both boys and girls, but have been most striking in girls and young women.”

Youngsters who present with gender identity issues to services may also have depression, anxiety, body dysmorphia, tics and eating disorders, as well as autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and/or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Referrals to Gids are also associated with higher than average rates of adverse childhood experiences, the review says.

“There is no single explanation for the increase in prevalence of gender incongruence or the change in case-mix of those being referred to gender services,” the review says, concluding instead that gender incongruence is a result of “a complex interplay between biological, psychological and social factors”.

Transitioning

Young people’s sense of their identity is not always fixed and can evolve over time, Cass says.

“Whilst some young people may feel an urgency to transition, young adults looking back at their younger selves would often advise slowing down,” the report says.

“For some, the best outcome will be transition, whereas others may resolve their distress in other ways. Some may transition and then de/retransition and/or experience regret. The NHS needs to care for all those seeking support.”

Social transitioning

Social transitioning is the process by which individuals make social changes in order to live as a different gender, such as changing name, pronouns, hair or clothing, and it is something that schools in England have been grappling with in recent years.

According to the Cass review, many children and young people attending Gids have already changed their names by deed-poll and attend school in their chosen gender by the time they are seen.

The review says research on the impact of social transition is generally of a poor quality and the findings are contradictory. Some studies suggest that allowing a child to socially transition may improve mental health and social and educational participation.

Others say a child who is allowed to socially transition is more likely to have an altered trajectory, leading to medical intervention, which will have life-long implications, when they might otherwise have desisted.

“Given the weakness of the research in this area there remain many unknowns about the impact of social transition,” the review concludes. “In particular, it is unclear whether it alters the trajectory of gender development, and what short- and longer-term impact this may have on mental health.”

The review recommends that parents should be involved in decision making, unless there are strong grounds to believe this may put a child at risk, and where children are pre-puberty, families should be seen as early as possible by a clinician with relevant experience. It also suggests avoiding premature decisions and considering partial rather than full transitioning as a way of keeping options open.

Future care

The report says that in the future any young person seeking NHS help with gender-related distress should be screened to see if they have any neurodevelopmental conditions, such as autism spectrum disorder, and also given a mental health assessment.

NHS England has already in effect banned the use of puberty blockers because of limited evidence that they work. Cass found that there is “no evidence that puberty blockers buy time to think”, which their advocates have claimed. There is also “concern that they may change the trajectory of psychosexual and gender identity development” as well as pose long-term risks to users’ bone health, the review says.

There is also a lack of evidence to prove that masculinising and feminising hormones improve a young person’s body satisfaction and psychosocial health, and there is concern over the impact on fertility, growth and bone health. There is also no evidence they reduce the risk of suicide in children, as their proponents have claimed.

Lastly, the evidence base showing whether psychosocial interventions – therapy – work for those who do not undergo hormone treatment is “as weak” as for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones.

All this means that there is “a major gap in our knowledge about how best to support and help the growing population of young people with gender-related distress in the context of complex presentations”.

• Transgender
• Young people

More on this story

What Cass review says about surge in children seeking gender services

Adult transgender clinics in England face inquiry into patient care

‘Children are being used as a football’: Hilary Cass on her review of gender identity services

Thousands of children unsure of gender identity ‘let down by NHS’, report finds

Review of gender services has major implications for mental health services

Mother criticises ‘agenda from above’ after release of Cass report

Gender medicine ‘built on shaky foundations’, Cass review finds

Cass review set to confirm shift in NHS care for children with gender dysphoria

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