A chance event that made us human.

What was it that changed our brains so that we went from being apes to beginning to be humans? Well, researchers from various American institutions coordinated by the Gladstone Institutes have come to an extraordinary conclusion and that is that a chance event occurred approximately one million years ago that they have not been able to determine but that it triggered a cascade of rapid changes in the DNA of our ancestors, which ended up creating the evolutionary line that developed unique human characteristics, such as having a large brain.

But how did the researchers come to this conclusion? By studying our DNA, which keeps a record of millions of years of evolution, specifically, the researchers analyzed the differences between humans and chimpanzees in stretches of DNA called human accelerated regions, or HARs in English.

DNA has the shape of a double helix and is extremely long. If we could stretch DNA, it would measure approximately one meter long. Therefore, to get into the cell nucleus, DNA has to be very folded and around it would be the HARs that would activate the genes that are next to them, because approximately a million years ago the DNA of our ancestors did something different from that of the rest of the mammals, it changed its way of folding and with it the position of the genes that were next to the HARs changed, being the genes that involved brain development benefited the most.

To understand it, imagine that you are a university student, in a class with hundreds of students who are placed in a specific order and you are unlucky enough to find yourself on the far side of the teacher, where you barely hear and next to a student who he spends his time sleeping and snoring, surely you won't learn much and your results at the end of the course will be bad, but one day the order changes and you are placed near the teacher and next to brilliant students who you can ask and with those who share information.

The result of your studies can change radically, the same thing happened with the genes, the genes were the same, but by folding differently the genes related to our brain suddenly found themselves next to the enhancer HARs, which was a change radical and opened the door for us to develop as humans and to differentiate ourselves from the rest of the apes.

The question is why this change occurred, that is something unknown to researchers or rather it is something temporarily unknown, because I am sure that new biological and archaeological investigations will be able to shed more light on what happened approximately a million years ago, a event that changed our brain and put us on the path to becoming human.

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