2. Human evolution:
• is the evolutionary process leading up to the
appearance of modern humans. While it
began with the last common ancestor of all
life, the topic usually covers only the
evolutionary history of primates, in particular
the genus Homo, and the emergence of Homo
sapiens as a distinct species of hominids
3. Human evolution:
• Genetic studies show that primates diverged
from other mammals about 85 million years
ago in the Late Cretaceous period, and the
earliest fossils appear in the Paleocene,
around 55 million years ago.
4. History of study (Darwin):
• The word homo, the name of the biological
genus to which humans belong, is Latin for
"human". It was chosen originally by Carolus
Linnaeus in his classification system.
5. Darwin theory:
• The possibility of linking humans with earlier
apes by descent became clear only after 1859
with the publication of Charles Darwin's On
the Origin of Species, in which he argued for
the idea of the evolution of new species from
earlier ones.
6. Fossils:
• A major problem at that time was the lack of
fossil intermediaries. Despite the 1891
discovery by Eugène Dubois of what is now
called Homo erectus at Trinil, Java, it was only
in the 1920s when such fossils were
discovered in Africa, that intermediate
species began to accumulate.
7. The East African fossils:
• During the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds of
fossils were found, particularly in East Africa in
the regions of the Olduvai gorge and Lake
Turkana. The driving force in the East African
researches was the Leakey family, with Louis
Leakey and his wife Mary Leakey, and later
their son Richard and daughter in-
law Meave being among the most successful
fossil hunters and palaeoanthropologists.
9. Anatomical changes:
• Human evolution is characterized by a number
of morphological, developmental, physiologica
l, and behavioral changes that have taken
place since the split between the last common
ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.
10. Bipedalism:
• Bipedalism is the basic adaption of
the Hominin line and is considered the main
cause behind a suite of skeletal changes
shared by all bipedal hominins.
11. Evidence:
• The evidence on which scientific accounts of
human evolution is based comes from many
fields of natural science. The main sources 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.
