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The history of biology traces the study of the living world from ancient to modern times. Although the concept of biology as a single coherent field arose in the 19th century, the biological sciences emerged from traditions of medicine and natural history reaching back to Ayurveda, ancient Egyptian medicine and the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus and Galen in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
The history of life on Earth traces the processes by which living and extinct organisms evolved, from the earliest emergence of life to the present day. Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago (abbreviated as Ga, for gigaannum) and evidence suggests that life emerged prior to 3.7 Ga. [1] [2] [3] The similarities among all known present-day species indicate that they have diverged through the ...
Paleontology ( / ˌpeɪliɒnˈtɒlədʒi, ˌpæli -, - ən -/ PAY-lee-on-TOL-ə-jee, PAL-ee-, -ən- ), also spelled palaeontology[ a] or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). [citation needed] It includes the study of fossils to classify ...
539 Ma – present. The Phanerozoic Eon (Greek: period of well-displayed life) marks the appearance in the fossil record of abundant, shell-forming and/or trace-making organisms. It is subdivided into three eras, the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic, with major mass extinctions at division points.
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity—in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Church Fathers as well as in medieval Islamic science. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two ...
The history of botany examines the human effort to understand life on Earth by tracing the historical development of the discipline of botany —that part of natural science dealing with organisms traditionally treated as plants. Rudimentary botanical science began with empirically based plant lore passed from generation to generation in the ...
Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history through late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the development of Sumerian cuneiform script and continuing until the expansion of Islam in late antiquity. Ancient history covers all continents inhabited by ...
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 . It includes brief explanations of the various taxonomic ranks in ...