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Humans (species in the genus Homo) are the only animals that cook their food, and Wrangham argues Homo erectus emerged about two million years ago as a result of this unique trait. Cooking had profound evolutionary effects because it increased food efficiency, which allowed human ancestors to spend less time foraging, chewing, and digesting.
Apes eat a variety of plant and animal foods, with the majority of food being plant foods, which can include fruits, leaves, stalks, roots and seeds, including nuts and grass seeds. Human diets are sometimes substantially different from that of other hominoids due in part to the development of technology and a wide range of habitation.
The basic ranks are species and genus. When an organism is given a species name it is assigned to a genus, and the genus name is part of the species name. The species name is also called a binomial, that is, a two-term name. For example, the zoological name for the human species is Homo sapiens. This is usually italicized in print or underlined ...
Gray also supplied Hominini as the name of the tribe including both chimpanzees (genus Pan) and humans (genus Homo). The discovery of the first extinct archaic human species from the fossil record dates to the mid 19th century: Homo neanderthalensis, classified in 1864. Since then, a number of other archaic species have been named, but there is ...
Even compared with other social animals, humans have an unusually high degree of flexibility in their facial expressions. [291] Humans are the only animals known to cry emotional tears. [292] Humans are one of the few animals able to self-recognize in mirror tests [293] and there is also debate over to what extent humans are the only animals ...
For example, the human species is uniquely identified within the animal kingdom by the name Homo sapiens. No other species of animal can have this same binomen (the technical term for a binomial in the case of animals). Prior to Linnaean taxonomy, animals were classified according to their mode of movement.
Palorchestes, a genus of the extinct marsupial family Palorchestidae, which are closely related to wombats and koalas in the suborder Vombatiformes, was nicknamed the "marsupial tapir" due to the shape of the animal's nasal bones, which was presumed that they possessed a short proboscis, [63] like those of placental tapirs today.
The genus Pan is part of the subfamily Homininae, to which humans also belong. The lineages of chimpanzees [ dubious – discuss ] and humans separated in a process of speciation between roughly five to twelve million years ago, [ 25 ] making them humanity's closest living relative. [ 26 ]