The perils of climate change are well known, but rising sea levels could also alter human evolution, scientists have claimed. Rising sea levels could force communities to live in underwater or semi-aquatic towns and that could change our physiology.Matthew Skinner, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of Kent, UK, claims that humans could evolve to have webbed hands and feet and less body hair so that they could move quickly through water.Our eyes would become more like those of cats so that we could see in the murky gloom of seas and rivers, and our lungs would shrink as we became used to using tanked air to breathe underwater."Regular underwater foraging would lead to the evolution of longer fingers and toes which would then probably develop interconnecting webs to make swimming more efficient," said Skinner."We might evolve a tapetum lucidum, an additional layer in the retina, like cats have, that would improve our vision in low light conditions such as underwater."Due to the cold under water we would maintain a layer of baby fat into adulthood as an insulator."Colonising another planet, such as Mars, would also have implications for the human body. Nasa has already said it wants to have Earth-independent habitations on the Red Planet by the 2030s but a reduced-gravity environment would change how bones grow, altering overall body shape and size.A weaker gravitational pull would mean the legs would have to support less body weight and would become shorter.An opposable big toe could develop to allow greater dexterity in a weightless environment.Because of the absence of natural predators, as well as the reduced need for physical exertion, our overall body size would reduce.Humans might even follow a common evolutionary phenomenon called "island dwarfing", which occurs in a number of mammals when there is low resource availability and few predators.Skinner added: "The technological developments that allow us to inhabit another planet would also suggest that basic dietary requirements would be met through manufactured nutritionally balanced non-solid substances.""The most obvious relaxation of selective pressure would be on the teeth and jaws."Another scenario would be Earth being plunged into an ice age if an asteroid hit it, causing dust to cover it and block out the sun.The lack of sunlight would cause our skin and hair to become paler to improve the absorption of vitamin D, which is essential to health. Nose and face size would increase to warm cold air behind the nose. Both men and women would have to get bigger to survive in such an inhospitable environment, and would have an increase in body hair for insulation.Humans have evolved over millions of years to be completely adapted to today's environment.People who live at high altitude have greater lung capacity, and those who live in the more northerly environments have grown paler to enable them to soak up more sunlight. ..