Yale Researchers Find ‘Junk DNA’ May Have Triggered Key Evolutionary Changes in Human Thumb and Foot

Out of the 3 billion genetic letters that spell out the human genome, Yale scientists have found a handful that may have contributed to the evolutionary changes in human limbs that enabled us to manipulate tools and walk upright. Results from a comparative analysis of the human, chimpanzee, rhesus macaque and other genomes reported in the journal Science suggest our evolution may have been driven not only by sequence changes in genes, but by changes in areas of the genome once thought of as junk DNA