News tagged with human origins
Blame backbone fractures on evolution, not osteoporosis
Osteoporosis is blamed for backbone fractures. The real culprit could well be our own vertebrae, which evolved to absorb the pounding of upright walking, researchers at Case Western Reserve University say.
Oct 20, 2011 |
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Sexual selection by sugar molecule helped determine human origins
Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say that losing the ability to make a particular kind of sugar molecule boosted disease protection in early hominids, and may have ...
Oct 10, 2011 |
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Researchers consider ancestry of recent fossil finds
(PhysOrg.com) -- Someday a future intelligent organism could sweep away a million years of dust and find the bones of a Homo sapiens and wonder what he was.
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Mar 21, 2011 |
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British cave yields ice-age skull cups
Ice age Britons drank from human skulls and may even have eaten flesh and bone marrow, but they were far from barbarians.
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Feb 17, 2011 |
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Biological anthropologists question claims for human ancestry
"Too simple" and "not so fast" suggest biological anthropologists from the George Washington University and New York University about the origins of human ancestry. In the upcoming issue of the journal Nature, the anthro ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Feb 16, 2011 |
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Earliest humans not so different from us, research suggests
(PhysOrg.com) -- That human evolution follows a progressive trajectory is one of the most deeply-entrenched assumptions about our species. This assumption is often expressed in popular media by showing cavemen ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Feb 14, 2011 |
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New statistical model moves human evolution back 3 million years
Evolutionary divergence of humans from chimpanzees likely occurred some 8 million years ago rather than the 5 million year estimate widely accepted by scientists, a new statistical model suggests.
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Nov 05, 2010 |
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Paleoanthropologist writes 'untold story of our salvation'
Inside caves near Mossel Bay, South Africa, a team of explorers have been piecing together an account of survival, ingenuity and endurance -- of the species known as Homo sapiens. Team leader Curtis Marean, a paleoanthropologist ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Aug 05, 2010 |
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Study finds genetic links among Jewish people
Using sophisticated genetic analysis, scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and New York University School of Medicine have published a study indicating that Jews are a widely dispersed people ...
Jun 03, 2010 |
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The Rise of the Mind
When and where did the cognitive abilities of modern humans arise? It's a big question -- one debated by anthropologists for decades. It's an even bigger question for an undergraduate thesis, but senior Logan ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Apr 22, 2010 |
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Darwin descended from Cro-Magnon man: scientists
The father of evolution Charles Darwin was a direct descendant of the Cro-Magnon people, whose entry into Europe 30,000 years ago heralded the demise of Neanderthals, scientists revealed in Australia Thursday.
Feb 04, 2010 |
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First 'genetic map' of Han Chinese may aid search for disease susceptibility genes
The first genetic historical map of the Han Chinese, the largest ethnic population in the world, as they migrated from south to north over evolutionary time. was published online today by the American Journal of Human Ge ...
Nov 25, 2009 |
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Two-million-year-old evidence shows tool-making hominins inhabited grassland environments
In an article published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE on October 21, 2009, Dr Thomas Plummer of Queens College at the City University of New York, Dr Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution Nation ...
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Oct 21, 2009 |
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Evolution axe goes on display
(PhysOrg.com) -- A flint hand axe that helped reveal the very ancient age of humankind goes on display at the Natural History Museum October 2009.
Other Sciences / Archaeology & Fossils
Oct 19, 2009 |
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The peopling of the Americas: Genetic ancestry influences health
At one time or another most of us wonder where we came from, where our parents or grandparents and their parents came from. Did our ancestors come from Europe or Asia? As curious as we are about our ancestors, for practical ...
Aug 14, 2009 |
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Human evolution
Human evolution, or anthropogenesis, is the part of biological evolution concerning the emergence of Homo sapiens as a distinct species from other hominins, great apes and placental mammals. It is the subject of a broad scientific inquiry that seeks to understand and describe how this change occurred. The study of human evolution encompasses many scientific disciplines, most notably physical anthropology, primatology, archaeology, linguistics and genetics.
The term "human", in the context of human evolution, refers to the genus Homo, but studies of human evolution usually include other hominins, such as the Australopithecines. The Homo genus diverged from the Australopithecines about 2 million years ago in Africa. Scientists have estimated that humans branched off from their common ancestor with chimpanzees—the only other living homininis—about 5–7 million years ago. Several species of Homo evolved that are now extinct. These include Homo erectus, which inhabited Asia, and Homo neanderthalensis, which inhabited Europe.
Archaic Homo sapiens evolved between 400,000 and 250,000 years ago. The dominant view among scientists is the recent African origin of modern humans (RAO) that H. sapiens evolved in Africa and spread across the globe, replacing populations of H. erectus and H. neanderthalensis. Scientists supporting the alternative hypothesis on the multiregional evolution (ME) view modern humans as having evolved as a single, widespread population from existing Homo species, particularly H. erectus. The fossil evidence is insufficient to resolve this vigorous debate,. Studies of haplogroups in Y-chromosomal DNA and mitochondrial DNA have largely supported a recent African origin, while some researchers argue that evidence from nuclear genes supports a multiregional origin.
For more information about Human evolution, read the full article at
Wikipedia.
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