Over the past 20 years, members of the international consortium Zoonomia have deciphered the genomes of animals from various families and compared them with the human DNA sequence. The results of many years of research have made it possible to better understand at what stage of evolution the changes occurred that made humans out of great apes. Science has established that the fundamental difference between man and animals occurred about a million years ago in South Africa. It was based on mutational processes that led to the fact that in the areas associated with the development of the brain of the “zone of accelerated human development”, the protein packaging of DNA was rearranged. These areas of the brain of ancient human ancestors accidentally happened to be next to enhancers - amplifiers of gene activity, which became a turning point in the history of ancient people.