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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 ...
Vestigiality is the retention, during the process of evolution, of genetically determined structures or attributes that have lost some or all of the ancestral function in a given species. [1] Assessment of the vestigiality must generally rely on comparison with homologous features in related species.
The timeline of human evolution outlines the major events in the evolutionary lineage of the modern human species, Homo sapiens, throughout the history of life, beginning some 4 billion years ago down to recent evolution within H. sapiens during and since the Last Glacial Period.
This phenomenon is an automatic-response mechanism that activates even before a human becomes consciously aware that a startling, unexpected or unknown sound has been "heard". [ 2 ] That this vestigial response occurs even before becoming consciously aware of a startling noise would explain why the function of ear-perking had evolved in animals.
"The vestigiality of the human vermiform appendix: A Modern Reappraisal"—evolutionary biology argument that the appendix is vestigial; Smith HF, Fisher RE, Everett ML, Thomas AD, Bollinger RR, Parker W (October 2009). "Comparative anatomy and phylogenetic distribution of the mammalian cecal appendix". Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
The finding that "Mitochondrial Eve" was relatively recent and African seemed to give the upper hand to the proponents of the Out of Africa hypothesis.But in 2002, Alan Templeton published a genetic analysis involving other loci in the genome as well, and this showed that some variants that are present in modern populations existed already in Asia hundreds of thousands of years ago. [31]
Human history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers . They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
Human evolution was not a simple linear or branched progression but involved interbreeding between related species. [38] [39] [40] Genomic research has shown that hybridization between substantially diverged lineages was common in human evolution. [41]