https://www.the-unidentified.net/fingerprints-of-our-ancient-alien-genetic-engineers/
The Chicken and the Chimp
What do chickens and chimpanzees have in common? To look at them, not much. Beyond the superficial form you might be surprised to know that there are regions of DNA code which are
almost identical in the genome of both species. One of these overlapping segments of code is 118 letters long and differs by only two letters between these species which are separated by 300 million years of divergent evolution. Talk about stability. When we come to contrast the same code segment against humans a shock awaits us, despite chimps being our closest living relative and diverged by a mere 6 million years, we find an 18-letter divergence. From what has been unravelled it seems this segment, HAR1, plays a role in the development of the cerebral cortex, both its pattern and layout.
It might be easy for the reader to see all of this and miss the enormity, when we read about discoveries in a scientific field that we don’t well understand, there is sometimes a sense of ‘so
what’. Let’s just keep in mind that until hominins parted ways from the ancestors of chimpanzees the rate of successful mutations was 1 letter per every 150,000,000 years, meaning that in almost all cases where a natural copying error occurred the impact was so severe that the affected offspring either died in utero or was severely handicapped and failed to successfully reproduce. Here we are talking about 18 successful ‘mutations’ in a fraction of that vast timescale.
“The fact that HAR1 was essentially frozen in time through hundreds of millions of years indicates that it does something very important; that it then underwent abrupt revision in humans suggests that this function was significantly modified in our lineage.” – Katherine Pollard, PhD bio-statistician at
the Gladstone Institute What then could possibly bring about 18 successful modifications to such a stable region of code, in
just 6,000,000 years?
For anyone wondering what the academic view is on how known evolutionary mechanisms could bring such a radical change into being let’s refer to the discoverer who I have already quoted above,
Katherine Pollard of the Gladstone Institute.
“Statistically speaking, the probability that a highly conserved DNA sequence will change multiple times over 6 million years of evolution is close to zero…”
Close to zero
There is yet no known evolutionary mechanism or environmental forces that would bring about such changes – as we have discussed the stability of these areas is essential to a healthy organism. Even with this glaring anomaly we might be tempted to put it all down to just a strange freak event, until we learn that there are now several hundred human specific accelerated regions of DNA code identified by scientists. While the vast majority of HARs remain mysterious in function, it is understood that they tend to modify the development of the foetus and that most are not inside genes but rather the switches which control gene expression (modifying the degree of function or turning genes on and off).
The researchers involved in the study of HARs suspect that it is these anomalous variations in highly conserved regions of code which brought about the most profound differences between humans
and their closest primate relatives. Astonishingly, and beyond any reasonable coincidence, more than half of the genes located near HARs are involved in brain development and function. This does not look like a random scattering of sporadic mutations, not at all. We also find evidence in the fossil record marking a sudden acceleration in the human brain size and structure at two specific points, one around 1,800,000 years ago, and a second close to 800,000 years ago.
“The way to evolve a human from a chimp-human ancestor is not to speed the ticking of the molecular clock as a whole. Rather the secret is to have rapid change occur in sites where those changes make an important difference in an organism's functioning.” – Katherine Pollard
Conclusion
The study of HARs is still in its relatively early stages and there will be many more revelations to come, but one thing that seems unlikely to change is the astonishing nature of these alterations and the type of language academics are forced to use in discussing them. As our own science of genetic engineering moves forwards, we are starting to understand that it is not all about hybridization and gene splicing but inevitably about directing the expression of genes. Once we can map out and understand the DNA code which acts as the switches for genetic expression, we will be able to absolutely shape the human organism – though no doubt through inevitable terrible mistakes and horrific failings. There is no single gene for the magnificent thing which is our brain, rather there are many genes with roles to play, and to make a beneficial change of significant magnitude requires tinkering with the degree to which these genes express in our biological make-up.
With the above understanding we can look at the hundreds of anomalous human specific accelerations which occurred after the split from Chimps and recognise the handiwork of master
geneticists, scientists with an understanding that is light years beyond our own (and likely many light years from their home). When all known evolutionary mechanisms are factored in and the numbers are crunched, there is a statistical chance at zero that these HARs would exist. Yet, there they are, fingerprints of the gods, a cosmic message in a biological bottle. While some will say that we can’t prove aliens did this, I would counter that science does not work that way, we should accept the strongest model which best explains the observed evidence. Right now, the only scientific explanation that immediately explains all the HARs (and many other anomalies specific to humans) is the one in which an unnatural event occurred, and something overcame all of the mechanics of evolution which had preserved our essential genomic stability – without killing us. We only know of one such force in the universe, intelligence.