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The timeline of the evolutionary history of life represents the current scientific theory outlining the major events during the development of life on planet Earth.Dates in this article are consensus estimates based on scientific evidence, mainly fossils.
It supports the modern evolutionary synthesis—the current scientific theory that explains how and why life changes over time. Evolutionary biologists document evidence of common descent, all the way back to the last universal common ancestor , by developing testable predictions, testing hypotheses, and constructing theories that illustrate ...
Most modern primates, however, have evolved to be trichromats. All old world monkeys and apes are trichromats, but new world monkeys are polymorphic trichromats, meaning that males and homozygous females are dichromats while heterozygous females are trichromats (with the exceptions of howler monkeys and night monkeys , who have more and less ...
Evolution is the change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. [1] [2] It occurs when evolutionary processes such as natural selection and genetic drift act on genetic variation, resulting in certain characteristics becoming more or less common within a population over successive generations. [3]
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 ...
Over time these evolutionary processes lead to formation of new species , changes within lineages , and loss of species . "Evolution" is also another name for evolutionary biology , the subfield of biology concerned with studying evolutionary processes that produced the diversity of life on Earth.
This species might be evolved some time before, up to c. 2 Ma ago. c. 1.7 Ma – Australopithecines go extinct. c. 1.8–0.8 Ma – colonisation of Eurasia by Homo erectus. c. 1.5 Ma – earliest possible evidence of the controlled use of fire by Homo erectus; c. 1.2 Ma – Homo antecessor evolves. Paranthropus dies out.
Edward Hitchcock's fold-out paleontological chart in his 1840 Elementary Geology. Although tree-like diagrams have long been used to organise knowledge, and although branching diagrams known as claves ("keys") were omnipresent in eighteenth-century natural history, it appears that the earliest tree diagram of natural order was the 1801 "Arbre botanique" (Botanical Tree) of the French ...