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The human foot evolved as a platform to support the entire weight of the body, rather than acting as a grasping structure (like hands), as it did in early hominids. Humans therefore have smaller toes than their bipedal ancestors. This includes a non-opposable hallux, which is relocated in line with the other toes. [7]
Written descriptions of human organs and parts can be traced back thousands of years to ancient Egyptian papyri, where attention to the body was necessitated by their highly elaborate burial practices. Theoretical considerations of the structure and function of the human body did not develop until far later, in ancient Greece.
The evidence on which scientific accounts of human evolution are based comes from many fields of natural science. The main source of knowledge about the evolutionary process has traditionally been the fossil record, but since the development of genetics beginning in the 1970s, DNA analysis has come to occupy a place of comparable importance.
Explanations of the rapid evolution and exceptional size of the human brain can be classified into five groups: instrumental, social, environmental, dietary, and anatomo-physiological. The instrumental hypotheses [ 72 ] are based on the logic that evolutionary selection for larger brains is beneficial for species survival, dominance, and spread ...
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [40] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.
The muscles connected to the ears of a human do not develop enough to have the same mobility allowed to monkeys. Arrows show the vestigial structure called Darwin's tubercle. In the context of human evolution, vestigiality involves those traits occurring in humans that have lost all or most of their original function through evolution. Although ...
Human evolution (origins of society and culture) – Transition of human species to anthropologically modern behavior; Inversion (evolutionary biology) – Hypothesis in developmental biology; Mosaic evolution – Evolution of characters at various rates both within and between species
In some of its facets human anatomy is closely related to embryology, comparative anatomy and comparative embryology, [1] through common roots in evolution; for example, much of the human body maintains the ancient segmental pattern that is present in all vertebrates with basic units being repeated, which is particularly obvious in the ...