Scientists have discovered a fundamental difference between humans and animals, which happened about a million years ago. Over the past 20 years, members of the international consortium Zoonomia have deciphered the genomes of 241 animal species from various families and compared them with the human DNA sequence. Biologists report that the results of many years of research have allowed them to better understand at what stage of evolution the changes occurred that made protohumans human. The term "zoonomia" (Zoonomia), after which the project was named, was introduced into scientific use by Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles Darwin, 1731-1802, English physician, naturalist, inventor and poet): he expressed a bold idea for his time that that all warm-blooded animals are related to each other and had a common ancestor in the distant past. It took scientists more than two centuries to confirm this theory. In his chapter on biogenesis, Erasmus Darwin anticipated many of the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was the first to develop a holistic theory of evolution.
In the early 2000s, the complete genomes of mice, humans, rats, and chimpanzees were published, which turned out to be very close, but there was not enough data for the study. This is how the Zoonomia project was born. More than 50 scientific organizations from different countries provided DNA samples to its participants. The results of the study were published in the form of 11 articles in the thematic issue of the journal Science. The task of the Zoonomia project participants was to identify the DNA features that determine species differences, and to find out at what stage in evolutionary history they were fixed at the genetic level. The studies concerned only representatives of the placental group, which appeared on the planet over the past 100 million years, and did not affect the more ancient marsupials and oviparous. Comparative genetics has allowed researchers to identify more than three million elements in human DNA, about half of which were previously unknown. It turned out that they play a crucial role in controlling all physiological processes in the body, and influence where, when and how much to produce proteins. It also turned out that approximately 11% of the genome (the so-called conserved DNA fragments) – about 4,500 regions in total – are identical in all mammals, including humans. They are necessary for the normal functioning of the body, and genetic changes in them can cause not only hereditary diseases, but also cancer.