Question: Could humans eolve further and develop a kind of tail or wings?

Laura Soul answered on 14 Mar 2013:

I think definitely not. Things evolve certain features because they are adapting to their environment, so they get them because having them is an advantage for survival. Little changes happen all the time to species, but big changes, like getting wings, take a very long time and have to be a real advantage for them to develop. If a human got a bit of a longer spine so had a tiny tiny tail (this could happen from one mutation), then it would be unlikely to make them better at surviving. So they wouldn’t be any more likely to have children than people without a tail so the tail mutation probably wouldn’t spread.

Humans have evolved so that we can now control our environment so I think it’s unlikely we will ever evolve more in a big way because we use machines and things to survive, we don’t need to adapt anymore.

There is one way tails could evolve, if everyone thought having a tiny tail was very attractive then these people would be more likely to have children, then having a tail might spread over lots and lots of generations, then people who had tiny tails would have children together and the children might have bigger tails. This is called ‘sexual selection’, it would take thousands and thousands of years and would only work if everyone thought tails were really sexy and wanted to have children with people with tails, which is probably not going to happen!