2 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
If a reliable way to speciate is to be separate from your original population due to geography, why aren't the Sentinelese another species yet
Comment by aTacoParty at 15/03/2023 at 19:25 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Not only must an original population be separate by geography, but those two populations must also face differential evolutionary pressures. One could argue that there's not enough difference between living on the island and people living on the mainland to generate separate species.
The bigger point is that there just hasn't been enough time. Evolution occurs over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. The Sentinelese people may have been there for hundreds or maybe even a thousand years but that's still far too short of a time period for a separate species to develop (usually). For comparison, Darwin's finches needed ~2 million years to separate into the different species on the different islands.
It is feasible that if they experience significantly different evolutionary pressures than mainland homo sapiens, and there is no intermixing, then perhaps in a million years they may become their own species.