One anthropologist believes we'll be a new species of human by 2050

Will your grandchildren be an entirely new kind of human being? This researcher thinks so. Mankind is undergoing an evolutionary transition as big as previous jumps from monkeys to apes, and apes to humans.

That's according to new research by evolutionary anthropologist, Cadell Last. His theory was recently published in the journal "current aging science".

Instead of the biological evolution that caused massive physical changes over millions of years, Last believes that cultural evolution is changing the human species in a matter of decades.

"Humans are naturally interested in music, movies, mathematics, and science and all of these things. So we're just entering a world where we can own our own cultural reproduction, and we can engage in this for an entire lifetime," Last said. "We're not in this world yet, but this is sort of where we're going."

He says human evolution is a long transition from quote, "living fast and dying young" to "living slow and dying old."

"What my paper tries to show is that the whole of human evolution in some sense can be viewed as our species trying to abolish the category of adulthood," Last said. "We want to keep the creativity of cultural reproduction into adulthood."

Last believes that as early as 2050, we'll be living to 120, on average. He thinks the biological clock is becoming obsolete.

"We'll be having babies later in life, and fewer of them, in order to focus on their cultural development," he explained.

"People are going to be able to have more control over how they spend their time and energy, culturally speaking. And that will be a big change, that will be a fundamental difference between industrial society and the society we're making."

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