A group of research scientists at Yale has discovered that the evolution of opposable thumbs and upright walking in humans is due to changes in the genome in the areas still classified as “junk DNA”*.
Results from a comparative analysis of the human, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque and other genomes reported in the journal Science suggest our evolution may have been driven not only by sequence changes in genes, but by changes in areas of the genome once thought of as “junk DNA.”
Those changes activated genes in primordial thumb and big toe …