Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The evidence on which scientific accounts of human evolution are based comes from many fields of natural science. The main source of knowledge about the evolutionary process has traditionally been the fossil record, but since the development of genetics beginning in the 1970s, DNA analysis has come to occupy a place of comparable importance.
The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human evolution. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-46786-5. (Note: this book contains very useful, information dense chapters on primate evolution in general, and human evolution in particular, including fossil history). Leakey, Richard & Lewin, Roger. Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes us Human ...
The remains or traces of organisms from a past geologic age embedded in rocks by natural processes are called fossils. They are extremely important for understanding the evolutionary history of life on Earth, as they provide direct evidence of evolution and detailed information on the ancestry of organisms.
The earliest evidence for life on Earth includes: 3.8 billion-year-old biogenic hematite in a banded iron formation of the Nuvvuagittuq Greenstone Belt in Canada; [30] graphite in 3.7 billion-year-old metasedimentary rocks in western Greenland; [31] and microbial mat fossils in 3.48 billion-year-old sandstone in Western Australia.
Professor of biology Jerry Coyne sums up biological evolution succinctly: [3]. Life on Earth evolved gradually beginning with one primitive species – perhaps a self-replicating molecule – that lived more than 3.5 billion years ago; it then branched out over time, throwing off many new and diverse species; and the mechanism for most (but not all) of evolutionary change is natural selection.
Enter the ‘Dragon Man’ It is part of normal scientific practice to revisit old fossils, said Xijun Ni, a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.
Paleoanthropology or paleo-anthropology is a branch of paleontology and anthropology which seeks to understand the early development of anatomically modern humans, a process known as hominization, through the reconstruction of evolutionary kinship lines within the family Hominidae, working from biological evidence (such as petrified skeletal remains, bone fragments, footprints) and cultural ...
Paleoanthropologists unearthed human fossils suggesting that the species left Africa at least 50,000 years earlier than previously thought.