Homo sapiens rules the roost

IT’S Leaving Cert time again; the cruel Darwinian ‘points race’ is selecting out the fittest. Such trials, alas, have always been with us.

Many types of human evolved ‘to strut and fret their hour upon the stage’, but only Homo sapiens remains standing. How did we come to rule the roost? Were our forebears brighter or more industrious than their competitors? Did we cheat in the great survival exam by killing off the competition? Is it even possible that we slept with the enemy for our own advantage?

Michael Hammer, population geneticist at the University of Arizona, thinks that we did. Writing in the May edition of Scientific American, he argues that having sex with our rivals “played a key role in the triumph of our kind”.