A Look into the Study of Human Evolution and Its Various Phases Through Time

[pic 1]Human Evolution

         A look into the study of Human Evolution and its various phases through time

Mali Newton

Historical Geology 1234

Dr. Jesse Carlucci

May 1, 2014

Introduction

Human Evolution is the lengthy process of change by which people originated from apelike ancestors. Scientific evidence shows that the physical and behavioral traits shared by all people originated from apelike ancestors and evolved over a period of approximately six million years (“Introduction to Human Evolution”, 2014). The aforementioned theory which was introduced by scientist Charles Darwin has been questioned by many throughout time, however insurmountable traces of evidence such as sharing physical characteristics (body structure, facial features, etc.), bipedalism (the ability to walk on two legs), and responses to climate change among other things have deemed to prove otherwise. The process of evolution has presented a tremendous transition from where early humans used to create tools for hunting and adapt to survival to the contemporary world that we live in now enjoying modern technological benefits such as the internet.

One of the earliest defining human traits, bipedalism, the ability to walk on two legs, evolved over 4 million years ago (“Introduction to Human Evolution”, 2014). Humans also developed a number of other key characteristics that we inherited from our apelike predecessors such as establishing a complex brain, being able to make and use various tools, and the ability to create languages to communicate, all of which are considered to have been developed more recently in geologic time. Not to mention the physical features we share with apes such as body structure, internal organs, etc.[pic 2]

Figure 1

Primate ancestry can be traced back nearly 60 million years, to around the time that flowering plants were starting to dominate forests, but what the very first primates were like remains mysterious (Pilcher, 2013). Paleoanthropologists, scientists who study human evolution,  have believed for a long time that humans descended from apelike ancestors, and that early human fossils belonged to a single evolving lineage. Based on this view, only later did our predecessors diversify into multiple overlapping branches of humans, of which our species is the sole survivor. Fossil discoveries have upended that scenario, however, providing intriguing evidence that the last common ancestor of humans and apes may not have looked particularly apelike (Harmon, 2013).