A hypothetical question about environment and evolution on an alien world?

Question

I have a crazy theory that during the last ice age a small group of eary humans where taken from earth by a group of aliens that thought that this race of self aware beings would become extinct by this hostile environment, so they transplanted them on a world suited to there physiology and left them to there own path on this new world. How would a slight change in the gravity of the planet make a differents in there evolution, say the gravity was 1.37 G's compaired to that of earth's 1.0 G environment, would a Parallel evolution happen or would it be a Convergent evolution or would evolution happen at all, i mean 10,000 years since the last ice age isn't a long time in the grand scale of things, would this be enough time for any physiological developments to appear in these early human cousins.?

Answer 1

First of all, yes, evolution would happen ... evolution ALWAYS happens, only the speed of it varies. In the instance of a sharp change in environment, such as in your hypothetical, evolution can actually happen quite rapidly. A .37% increase in gravity would be far from a "slight change" and one would assume the change in physiology would be rather rapid as the tall lanky and weak would find themselves having a very hard time with the being healthy enough to breed. Since how tall you are and how stocky you are and how strong you are are heavily influenced by genetics it would take surprisingly few generations before these new humans would be on the average much shorter and stockier than their earthbound counterparts.

Answer 2

There would be other factors to consider, where gravity increasing would have its effects, higher gravity would mean that the various elements/liquids on the planet would also behave differently, as humans are mostly carbon based and 80% water, the experiment would be to understand what happens to these basic elements in those conditions. Evolution would take place but as the basic parameters such as gravity have changed the rate would be slower and the result would most likely be negative than positive.

Answer 3

Actually I think that our bodies are so finely tuned to the conditions of earth that even this small change of gravity would cause those humans to die out because they could not evolve quickly enough to adjust to this change. We may not die immediatly but persistant health problems caused by this change would probablly kill those humans at least over a matter of years more quickly then they can reproduce.

Answer 4

Evolution would have been dictated by the nature of the new world and weather we change and adapt, they would get shorter like dwarfs.

Animal life would be effected by over hunting easy prey just like on this planet.