Human Evolution
Human Evolution
Who we are as a species, and where we came from; make up the basis of a fantastic story, spanning more than 4 million years. The search for the origins of humanity will be a story of bones and the tales they tell. It’s a story that begins in Africa, where our ancestors first stood up.Over millions of years they continued to evolve and eventually spread out across the globe. Some species adapted to the changing world, while others went extinct. Today only a single species of human survives, that species flourished because they developed a culture; a culture more complex than is ever been seen before. This is their story, this is our story.
It is relatively recently, during the latter th half of the 19 century, that the theory that human beings are the product of an evolutionary process was first advanced. This revolutionary theory was first developed by Charles Darwin
(1809-1882). In his noteworthy works ‘The Origin of Species’ 1859 and the ‘Descent of Man’ 1871 – he pointed out that humans were as much a product of evolution as other living organisms.
Human beings did not arrive readymade: they evolved from earlier and more primitive life forms. French scientist, Chevalier de Lamarck
(1744-1829) earlier in his work ‘Natural History of
Invertebrate Animals’ 1815 argued that plants and animals underwent change.
Digging the graves of our ancestors into the sands of time, we will find ourselves members of the order ‘primates’, and the anthropoid suborder, which includes apes, humans and monkeys; the other primate suborder is the prosimians which includes lemurs, tarsiers and lorises. We are in the superfamily Hominoidea and the family hominidae, which includes people and our ancestors going back at least several million years. The Hominidae separated from the
Pongidae family (chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas) at some point in the distant past in the
Miocene era (about 25 – 5 mya). In any case, a
crucial
Who we are as a species, and where we came from; make up the basis of a fantastic story, spanning more than 4 million years. The search for the origins of humanity will be a story of bones and the tales they tell. It’s a story that begins in Africa, where our ancestors first stood up.Over millions of years they continued to evolve and eventually spread out across the globe. Some species adapted to the changing world, while others went extinct. Today only a single species of human survives, that species flourished because they developed a culture; a culture more complex than is ever been seen before. This is their story, this is our story.
It is relatively recently, during the latter th half of the 19 century, that the theory that human beings are the product of an evolutionary process was first advanced. This revolutionary theory was first developed by Charles Darwin
(1809-1882). In his noteworthy works ‘The Origin of Species’ 1859 and the ‘Descent of Man’ 1871 – he pointed out that humans were as much a product of evolution as other living organisms.
Human beings did not arrive readymade: they evolved from earlier and more primitive life forms. French scientist, Chevalier de Lamarck
(1744-1829) earlier in his work ‘Natural History of
Invertebrate Animals’ 1815 argued that plants and animals underwent change.
Digging the graves of our ancestors into the sands of time, we will find ourselves members of the order ‘primates’, and the anthropoid suborder, which includes apes, humans and monkeys; the other primate suborder is the prosimians which includes lemurs, tarsiers and lorises. We are in the superfamily Hominoidea and the family hominidae, which includes people and our ancestors going back at least several million years. The Hominidae separated from the
Pongidae family (chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas) at some point in the distant past in the
Miocene era (about 25 – 5 mya). In any case, a
crucial