Science

Zoonomia biologists have found a significant difference between humans and animals in 20 years

The Zoonomia project has completed twenty years of work. The researchers managed to decode the genomes of 240 animals from different families and compare them with human DNA. It helped to better understand what and when made us human, "RIA Novosti" wrote.

The main difficulty of the research was that the human has a very large genome, and the mechanism of its work has not actually been studied.

In the early 2000s, scientists found regions in the human genome associated with brain development. They are the so-called HAR, "zones of accelerated human development". They are also present in advanced primates. But the differences appeared about a million years ago.

"As a result of the structural rearrangement of DNA, which occurred in human ancestors a million years ago, the genes responsible for brain development accidentally appeared next to HAR enhancers. And it was a turning point in the history of our species," the newspaper wrote.