10,000 years isn't that short a time in a rapidly changing environment, though it would be in a static one. Human mematic evolution fed into human genetic evolution in a number of ways over that timeframe. As people started getting most of their calories from farming they didn't have as much dietary vitamin D and their skin got lighter. People in Eurasia got more resistant to contagious disease and were able to live together in larger groups, accelerating memetic evolution.
Gould came up with the excellent name "punctuated equilibrium" for the discontinuous nature of genetic change, though the math describing it had existed before he popularized the concept.
It is true, though, that all the big changes of the last 10,000 years seem to have been simple changes in individual genes or their expression rather than more complex changes.
Gould came up with the excellent name "punctuated equilibrium" for the discontinuous nature of genetic change, though the math describing it had existed before he popularized the concept.
It is true, though, that all the big changes of the last 10,000 years seem to have been simple changes in individual genes or their expression rather than more complex changes.