Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
They first appeared in the fossil record around 66 million years ago, soon after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event that eliminated about three-quarters of plant and animal species on Earth, including most dinosaurs. [25] [26] One of the last Plesiadapiformes is Carpolestes simpsoni, having grasping digits but not forward-facing eyes.
This is a list of dates associated with the prehistoric peopling of the world (first known presence of Homo sapiens). The list is divided into four categories, Middle Paleolithic (before 50,000 years ago), Upper Paleolithic (50,000 to 12,500 years ago), Holocene (12,500 to 500 years ago) and Modern ( Age of Sail and modern exploration).
The first debates about the nature of human evolution arose between Thomas Henry Huxley and Richard Owen. Huxley argued for human evolution from apes by illustrating many of the similarities and differences between humans and other apes, and did so particularly in his 1863 book Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.
The first seaborne human migrations were by the Austronesian peoples [dubious – discuss] originating from Taiwan known as the "Austronesian expansion". [144] Using advanced sailing technologies like catamarans , outrigger boats , and crab claw sails , they built the first sea-going ships and rapidly colonized Island Southeast Asia at around ...
The chimpanzee–human divergence likely took place during around 10 to 7 million years ago. [1] The list of fossils begins with Graecopithecus, dated some 7.2 million years ago, which may or may not still be ancestral to both the human and the chimpanzee lineage.
All life on Earth can be traced back to a Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA—and it likely lived on Earth only 400 million years after its formation.
Many modern mammal groups begin to appear: first glyptodonts, ground sloths, canids, peccaries, and the first eagles and hawks. Diversity in toothed and baleen whales. 33 Ma Evolution of the thylacinid marsupials . 30 Ma First balanids and eucalypts, extinction of embrithopod and brontothere mammals, earliest pigs and cats. 28 Ma
Roughly 2.4 million years ago Homo habilis had appeared in East Africa: the first known human species, and the first known to make stone tools, yet the disputed findings of signs of tool use from even earlier ages and from the same vicinity as multiple Australopithecus fossils may put to question how much more intelligent than its predecessors ...