The human race has peaked in many areas and will now decline, scientists suggest - Independent

7/12/2017

The human race has peaked in many areas and will now decline, scientists suggest

There appears to be a limit to how tall, old and strong we can be, according to a major new study

Andrew Griffin @_andrew_griffin 11 hours ago0 comments

Humanity has reached its peak and is now probably in its downfall, according to major new research.

People have long thought of human development as one long process of improvement, going on forever. But we are now running up against the limits of how good we can be, say scientists – and most likely we'll now just begin to fall again.

The major research review looked at 120 years of data and found that there appears to be limits on our characteristics, like when we die, how tall we can be and how strong we are. We are pushing up against those limits now, the research suggests.

What's more, the ways that we are changing our environment – including through global warming – is probably going to pull those limits down and force humanity into a decline, the researchers said.

For a long time, humanity has looked to be improving. Sprinting speeds that once seemed impossible are now commonplace, for instance, and the record for oldest person in the world is often being broken.

But with time, we'll probably see fewer world records being broken, the new research suggests, and little development in how old the oldest people are. More people might reach those peaks of performance, but the peaks will get no higher, the research published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology found.

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"These traits no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical, and scientific progress. This suggests that modern societies have allowed our species to reach its limits. We are the first generation to become aware of this" said Jean-François Toussaint from Paris Descartes University, France.

Some of those limits now appear to be falling. And it is in large part because of changes we are making to our environment, said Professor Toussaint.

"This will be one of the biggest challenges of this century as the added pressure from anthropogenic activities will be responsible for damaging effects on human health and the environment." he said in a statement. "The current declines in human capacities we can see today are a sign that environmental changes, including climate, are already contributing to the increasing constraints we now have to consider.

"Observing decreasing tendencies may provide an early signal that something has changed but not for the better. Human height has decreased in the last decade in some African countries; this suggests some societies are no longer able to provide sufficient nutrition for each of their children and maintain the health of their younger inhabitants."

The focus of politicians and other important decision makers should now be to focus on ensuring as many people as possible can reach the current limits, rather than stressing our need to keep pushing them higher, the researchers said.

"Now that we know the limits of the human species, this can act as a clear goal for nations to ensure that human capacities reach their highest possible values for most of the population," said Professor Toussaint. "With escalating environmental constraints, this may cost increasingly more energy and investment in order to balance the rising ecosystem pressures. However, if successful, we then should observe an incremental rise in mean values of height, lifespan and most human biomarkers."