The Human Wave
People may have evolved fluidly, with lots of interbreeding
By Bruce Bower
Release a drop of red food coloring into a glass filled with water. Watch the drop slowly spread until it imbues the water with a rosy tint. Then, add a drop of blue coloring and observe the boundaries of purple expand. According to Vinayak Eswaran, this process, known as diffusion, reflects how, over the past 200,000 years, people evolved to have the relatively thin bones, small jaws, and other distinctive aspects of their current physical form.
A mechanical engineer at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur, Eswaran is an unlikely emissary of insights into human evolution. He primarily studies how chemicals and heat move through fluids. In his field, diffusion refers to a process in which molecules of a chemical in a fluid randomly bump into other molecules. These jostled particles follow erratic paths, taking what researchers call random walks. As a result, a chemical initially concentrated in one part of an apparently still fluid moves to other areas.