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iayork t1_j68t8yg wrote

Yes, hundreds of them. Mankind dates back maybe 200,000 years, if you limit it to Homo sapiens, and there are many species far younger than that:

>Haplochromine cichlid fishes of Africa’s Lake Victoria region encompass >700 diverse species that all evolved in the last 150,000 years.

--Ancient hybridization fuels rapid cichlid fish adaptive radiations

So there's hundreds of new species far younger than humans, in a single lake.

Glaciation (including the most recent Ice Age, which is of course more recent than humans) has also led to lots of speciation, as populations became isolated and diverged. For example:

>Pleistocene glacial cycles resulted in a burst of species diversification... By sampling across the geographic range of the five kiwi species, we discovered many cryptic lineages, bringing the total number of kiwi taxa that currently exist to 11 and the number that existed just before human arrival to 16 or 17. We found that 80% of kiwi diversification events date to the major glacial advances of the Middle and Late Pleistocene.

--Explosive ice age diversification of kiwi

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Sir-HP23 t1_j6929sp wrote

I seem to remember watching a programme where some light winged moth have a new strain of dark winged moths after the industrial revolution when soot was making the tree bark black. The two strains had got to the point where they had trouble interbreeding so, new sources.So that’s in the last couple of hundred years and in direct response to us.

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No_Perspective4340 t1_j6967rj wrote

It might be noted that "species" is a pretty complicated construct with no clear answer as to where to draw the line between very similar species. In a certain sense, every species is always evolving. Yet the observable effects are hard to separate into discrete chunks without looking at these huge time scales.

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iayork t1_j69e8ox wrote

Replying to cervicalgrdle (#1,557,798)

It’s debated whether domestic dogs are species or subspecies. The arguments are arcane and extremely tedious. Since it’s pretty much irrelevant to the question here (are there five thousand species since humans appeared, or five thousand and one?) I’m not interested in this semantic argument.

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MoonieNine t1_j69ei4x wrote

Alpacas. "Two wild species, vicunas and guanacos, emerged. They still live in the Andes. It is believed that about 6000 years ago, alpacas were created through breeding which was heavily influenced by the vicuna."

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Any-Broccoli-3911 t1_j69ilvd wrote

Replying to iayork (#1,558,401)

All domestic animals are typically considered species but can still reproduce with their wild ancestors, so it's more than one species you would add. Also, dingo are also sometime considered species or subspecies.

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copiouscoper t1_j69ouk9 wrote

Replying to Any-Broccoli-3911 (#1,559,028)

Polar bears and grizzlies can hybridize and produce fertile offspring, yet it would obviously be ridiculous to say they’re the same species. The fertile offspring argument has always been flimsy at best when defining a species.

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Idyotec t1_j69uqkm wrote

Replying to Sir-HP23 (#1,556,363)

This reminds me of a study done on birds that had been observed singing earlier and earlier over time and the conclusion was that they were trying to beat the noise pollution caused by traffic so that their mating calls were more likely to be heard by potential partners.

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team-tree-syndicate t1_j69wmmc wrote

Not sure if I would count this as an evolved species, but growing up in Alaska grasshoppers we're always green. When I moved to a different state and a big city, I noticed that there were tons of grasshoppers.

Big difference though, these one were grey or sand colored. They blended in perfectly with average concrete, asphalt, and sand. They blended in so well that it's almost impossible to spot them at work unless you see their shadow moving.

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DanYHKim t1_j6a4zvk wrote

Replying to Sir-HP23 (#1,556,363)

I've always wondered about moths being captured by streetlights. I figure that those moths are less likely to reproduce, since they are bashing their heads against a hot lamp, and are also picked off by bats all night long.

So, if there were a genetic component to their dependence on light for night flying orientation, could a mutation emerge that might reduce that dependence? That might allow a subset of moths to escape the artificial light. Such a mutation would reduce flight efficiency at night, since the moth may also not be well-oriented by the moon, and so would tumble in flight.

It might be useful to collect "country" moths and "city" moths, and test them for the ability to escape from strong artificial lights. One could then try cross-breeding them to find out if the variation is an inherited trait. If so, the genetic source of the variation might be found.

I think I once posted this question here on Reddit somewhere, and and alert reader gave me a link to a paper on the subject. It turns out that there are variations in light orientation dependence between moths that live in the city and those that live out in the darker countryside. I do not recall where I left the article, but I will try to find it .

In any case, there are selective pressures that are kind of associated with the presence of modern humans and our impact on the environment which have an impact on the behavior or morphology of different living things, and which may lead to a level of diversity that could be considered the emergence of a new species.

I believe there's also some work being done on the genetics of rats that live in the city, and how genetic variance may have behavioral adaptations which are more advantageous in an urban environment.

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Dbeka_X t1_j6atw1b wrote

Replying to copiouscoper (#1,559,954)

It is only flimsy if used incompletely: Two organisms belong to two different species if they do not reproduce - the keyword would be „reproductive community“. This can be due to genetical /anatomical differences or (!) because they don’t share the same ecological niche.

This definition does not apply to organisms that reproduce non-sexually.

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annomandaris t1_j6b417p wrote

Replying to cervicalgrdle (#1,557,798)

The current theory is dogs did not come from wolves, but that they had a common ancestor that split into dogs and wolves, then we domesticated dogs but wolves are and always have been undomesticatable

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Stephlau94 t1_j6b88vi wrote

Replying to annomandaris (#1,568,445)

Then how come they can still reproduce without any problem? I mean, the genus Panthera can also interbreed to a degree, but the resulting offspring is usually infertile or only partially fertile, the same with mules, but dog-wolf offspring don't (seem to) have this problem.

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ZekeDarwin t1_j6bs61q wrote

Replying to Dbeka_X (#1,566,741)

Nah, absolutely not a certain metric. Biologists deal with life, and life is super complex. Way too complex to categorize into the little boxes that we desire.

Hybridization is very common in the animal kingdom, way more common than we realized in the early days of taxonomy… centuries before dna would be discovered.

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Dbeka_X t1_j6cjpgk wrote

Replying to ZekeDarwin (#1,572,309)

We talk about science. The art of science is it to put the real world into categories. No categories no science.

I wonder what "Hybridization is very common in the animal kingdom" does mean. Any data? Usually Hybrids are sterile, so there is no effect on natural occurring species - see here. And: Hybrids are no species. I understood that occuring hybridization is a result of the anthropocene.

Taxonomy may be old but species is the central unit of evolutionary biology. The concept was developed by Ernst Mayr, who knew about DNA. Indeed the idea behind it all is that genes can be shared by all members of a given species. When gene flow is hampered by barriers populations can differentiate. Genetic differentiation will lead to phenotypic differentiation. New species are born.

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MixPuzzleheaded1730 t1_j6cwle1 wrote

Could there be new human species that have emerged since Sapiens? If so how would we know and identify them, eg that they have particular features uncommon in most Sapiens?

Sorry I posted this same question moments ago but in the wrong thread.

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SpankyMcDangle t1_j6drpcc wrote

It would be hard to tell if a species was new, or just previously undiscovered. But, some animals have evolved in the very recent past. The Norwegian rat is no longer susceptible to warfarin-based poisons. Evolution does not favor larger organisms, and humans are losing the race. Bacteria and viruses have existed a lot longer than humans and they continually adapt, evolve and conquer. And that doesn't even include the Weaponized stupidity that the party of Trump has introduced to the human species.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.176.4041.1343

Edit to include… I wasn't considering the domestication of animals when I gave my answer. Someone down the line brought that up.

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annomandaris t1_j6iq1pz wrote

Replying to djublonskopf (#1,611,158)

Yes, I mean as far as Ive read, the wolf/dog ancestor split into 2 wolf types. One was the ancestor of wolves that would become the wolves as we know them today, and the other was a wolf that would eventually be domesticated, and become something like a husky/malamutes, and eventually the rest of dog species.

So while wolves have been bred with dogs at several points in history, it’s not quite accurate to say dogs came from wolves (the ones we know today). They came from other wolves.

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turnpikelad t1_j6jhupl wrote

One super-clear example of speciation since the emergence of humans is polar bears. They only diverged from brown bears around 100 thousand years ago, and some of the more significant morphological changes apparently date from just the last 10000 years.

(According to wikipedia at least.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_bear#Taxonomy_and_evolution )

It's fascinating because it doesn't seem like any other animal in the history of the planet had thrived in that particular niche (large land mammal mainly living on sea ice as a predator of marine species).

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