Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Evidence of common descent of living organisms has been discovered by scientists researching in a variety of disciplines over many decades, demonstrating that all life on Earth comes from a single ancestor. This forms an important part of the evidence on which evolutionary theory rests, demonstrates that evolution does occur, and illustrates ...
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.
The hominoids are descendants of a common ancestor. Human evolution is the evolutionary process within the history of primates that led to the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species of the hominid family that includes all the great apes. [ 1] This process involved the gradual development of traits such as human bipedalism, dexterity ...
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.
Early human migrations are the earliest migrations and expansions of archaic and modern humans across continents. They are believed to have begun approximately 2 million years ago with the early expansions out of Africa by Homo erectus. This initial migration was followed by other archaic humans including H. heidelbergensis, which lived around ...
Biologists classify humans, along with only a few other species, as great apes (species in the family Hominidae).The living Hominidae include two distinct species of chimpanzee (the bonobo, Pan paniscus, and the chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes), two species of gorilla (the western gorilla, Gorilla gorilla, and the eastern gorilla, Gorilla graueri), and two species of orangutan (the Bornean ...
In a form of reciprocal evolution humans have influenced these plants as much as the plants have influenced the people that consume them, is known as coevolution. [21] Selective plant breeding is also used in research to produce transgenic animals that breed "true" (i.e., are homozygous) for artificially inserted or deleted genes. [22]
Life history theory ( LHT) is an analytical framework [ 1] designed to study the diversity of life history strategies used by different organisms throughout the world, as well as the causes and results of the variation in their life cycles. [ 2] It is a theory of biological evolution that seeks to explain aspects of organisms' anatomy and ...