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With that may come choice about a baby’s features, so perhaps humans will look like what their parents want them to look like. But in the future, Mailund suggests, it may be seen as unethical not to change certain genes. Scientists already have the technology to change the genes of an embryo, though it’s controversial and no one’s sure what happens next. As well as brain implants, we might have more visible parts of technology as an element of our appearance, such an artificial eye with a camera that can read different frequencies of colour and visuals. Perhaps in the future, implants will be used simply to improve a person. “It’s not really a biological question anymore, it’s technological,” he said.Ĭurrently, people have implants to fix an element of the body that’s broken, such as a pacemaker or a hip implant. We’re getting there but it’s very experimental.”

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We can implant it but we don’t know how to wire it up to make it useful. “We know what genes are involved in building a brain that’s good at remembering people’s names. “An implant in the brain would allow us to remember people’s names,” says Thomas. Remembering people’s names, for example, could become a much more important skill. Mailund suggests we may evolve in ways that help us to deal with this. Back when we were hunter gatherers, there would’ve been a handful of interactions on a daily basis. Living alongside lots of people is a new condition humans have to adapt to. Perhaps, then, we could evolve to be smaller so our bodies would need less energy, suggests Thomas Mailund, Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics and Big Data at Anglia Ruskin University, London, which would be handy on a highly-populated planet. In terms of looks, humans have become fatter and, in some areas, taller. Agricultural living and plentiful food have led to health problems that we’ve used science to solve, such as treating diabetes with insulin.

Over more recent history, during the last 10,000 years, there have been significant changes for humans to adapt to. A million years ago, there were probably a few different species of humans around, including Homo heidelbergensis, which shared similarities with both Homo erectus and modern humans, but more primitive anatomy than the later Neanderthal. Of course, we don’t know, but to consider the question, let’s scoot back a million years to see what humans looked like then.

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Might humans morph into a hybrid species of biological and artificial beings? Or could we become smaller or taller, thinner or fatter, or even with different facial features and skin colour? Will our descendants be cyborgs with hi-tech machine implants, regrowable limbs and cameras for eyes like something out of a science fiction novel? To understand our future evolution we need to look to our past.

The world after humans show