NATURE'S race to create the perfect person has shifted into top gear, with humans evolving 100 times faster than at any time since the rise of man some 6 million years ago.

That is the finding of researchers who have sifted through data collected by the international effort to map our genetic blueprint.

The pace of human evolution in the past 5000 years was "immense … something nobody expected", John Hawks, a University of Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist, said yesterday.