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Life has made dramatic changes in the environment. Most dramatic was the Great Oxygenation Event, about 2.4 billion years ago, in which photosynthetic organisms flooded the atmosphere with oxygen. Living organisms also catalyze reactions, creating minerals such as aragonite that are not in equilibrium with their surroundings.
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 continential land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
The linear view of human evolution began to be abandoned in the 1970s as different species of humans were discovered that made the linear concept increasingly unlikely. In the 21st century with the advent of molecular biology techniques and computerization, whole-genome sequencing of Neanderthal and human genome were performed, confirming ...
Italian polymath Galileo Galilei was an early user and made prolific discoveries, including the phases of Venus, which definitively disproved the arrangement of spheres in the Ptolemaic system. Galileo also discovered that the Moon was cratered, that the Sun was marked with sunspots, and that Jupiter had four satellites in orbit around it. [13]
The last common ancestor between humans and other apes possibly had a similar method of locomotion. 12-8 Ma The clade currently represented by humans and the genus Pan (chimpanzees and bonobos) splits from the ancestors of the gorillas between c. 12 to 8 Ma. [31] 8-6 Ma Sahelanthropus tchadensis
NASA's 2015 strategy for astrobiology aimed to solve the puzzle of the origin of life – how a fully functioning living system could emerge from non-living components – through research on the prebiotic origin of life's chemicals, both in space and on planets, as well as the functioning of early biomolecules to catalyse reactions and support inheritance.
The symbol of light was a pagan device adopted by Christians, and perhaps the most important one that did not come from Jewish traditions. Christian churches were built so that the congregation faced toward the sunrise. [239] Tonatiuh, the Aztec god of the sun, [240] was closely associated with the practice of human sacrifice. [240]
The natural evolution of the Sun made it progressively more luminous during the Archean and Proterozoic eons; the Sun's luminosity increases 6% every billion years. [59]: 165 As a result, the Earth began to receive more heat from the Sun in the Proterozoic eon. However, the Earth did not get warmer.