Many of the important advances made by biologists in the past 150 years can be reduced to a single metaphor. All living, or extant, organisms, that is, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, viruses, and all the types of organisms that lived in the past, are situated somewhere on the branches and twigs of an arborvitae or Tree of Life. We are connected to all organisms that are alive today, and all the organisms that have ever lived, via the branches of the Tree of Life (TOL). The extinct organisms that lie on the branches that connect us to the root of the tree are our ancestors. The rest, on branches that connect directly with our own, are closely related to modern humans, but they are not our ancestors.
[...]... branch that contains all the animals with backbones Around 400 million years ago we would enter the branch that contains vertebrates that have four limbs, then around 250 million years ago into the branch that contains the mammals, and then into a thin branch that contains one of the subgroups of mammals called the primates At the base of this primate 1 Human Evolution 1 A diagram of the vertebrate... his medical studies in 1537 In the same year he was appointed to teach anatomy and surgery in Padua, Italy Vesalius’ own anatomy education was typical for the time The professor sat in his chair (hence professorships are called ‘chairs’) and read out loud from the only locally available textbook He sat at a safe distance from a human body that was being dissected by his assistant It did not take long... in Genesis: reason-based explanations were replaced by faith-based ones The main parts of the narrative are well known God created humans in the form of a man, Adam, and then a woman, Eve Because they were the result of God’s handiwork Adam and Eve must have come equipped with language and with rational and cultured minds According to this version of human origins, the first humans were able to live... Major differences between the skeletons of a modern human and a living chimpanzee 60 4 The main morphological and behavioural differences between modern humans and Neanderthals 110 This page intentionally left blank Chapter 1 Introduction Many of the important advances made by biologists in the past 150 years can be reduced to a single metaphor All living, or extant, organisms, that is, animals, plants,... relationships among living higher primates supported by the DNA evidence Table 1 A traditional taxonomy (A) and a modern taxonomy (B) that take account of the molecular and genetic evidence that chimpanzees are more closely related to modern humans than they are to gorillas: extinct taxa are in bold type © Bernard Wood A Superfamily Hominoidea (hominoids) Family Hylobatidae (hylobatids) Genus Hylobates Family... total of 12 The groups recognized at each level in the Linnaean hierarchy are called ‘taxonomic groups’ Each distinctive group is called a ‘taxon’ (pl ‘taxa’) Thus, the species Homo sapiens is a taxon, and so is the order Primates When the system is applied to a group of related organisms, the scheme is called a Linnaean taxonomy, usually abbreviated to a taxonomy The Linnaean taxonomic system is also... in harmony, and they possessed all the mental and moral capacities that, according to the biblical narrative, set humanity above and apart from other animals The biblical explanation for the different races of modern humans is that they originated when Noah’s offspring migrated to different parts of the world after the last big biblical flood, or deluge The Latin for ‘flood’ is diluvium, so we call anything... the earth Uniformitarianism suggested that the processes that shaped the earth’s surface in the past, such as erosion and volcanism, were the same processes we see in action today Lyell also championed the principle that rocks and strata generally increase in age the further down they are in any relatively simple geological sequence Barring major and obvious upheavals and deliberate burial, the same... relations of Man to the Lower Animals’ that formed the central section of his 1863 book called Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature, he concluded the anatomical differences between modern humans and the chimpanzee and gorilla were less marked than the differences between the two African apes and the orangutan 19 Finding our place Not so long ago a book on human origins would have devoted a substantial number... study samples of a serum (serum is what is left after blood has clotted) protein called albumin taken from modern humans, apes, and monkeys He came to the conclusion that the albumins of modern humans and chimpanzees were so alike in their structure that you cannot tell them apart Proteins are made up of a string of amino acids In many instances one amino acid may be substituted for another without changing . stage of the human evolutionary journey, the part between the most recent common ancestor shared by chimpanzees and humans and present-day modern humans. To understand. of improving our understanding of human evolutionary history. The second is to convey a sense of what we think we know about human evolutionary history, and the