Devon+Friedfertig

 Hi everybody my name is soxrule589 and I am here to talk about human evolution with you. Do people ever tell you that humans came from monkeys or apes? Well then they are not exactly correct? The scientific theory is that humans, apes, and monkeys share a common ancestor. This Common ancestor probably lived over 45 million years ago.  To this theory scientists have found fossils of organisms that show both traits of humans and apes.  Humans are classified as primates. Now you ask what a primate? Well, primates are a group of mammals that include humans, apes, monkeys, lemurs. It is a type of mammal characterized by opposable thumbs and binocular vision. Ok now that we have that clear, then let’s move on to what we know as the first primate. The ancestor of primates may have co-existed with the dinosaurs. They lived in trees and were active at night ate insects. In addition, with that, these ancestors were very tiny creatures. The first primates did not exist until the dinosaurs died out. 45 million years ago mammals appeared with larger brain. These primates were more similar to you, me, your mom and dad. Do you know about apes and chimpanzees, scientists think they are closest relative to humans. A relative is your great grandparents, grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles. About six to thirty million years ago chimps and apes over time have changed characteristics. Enough about primates let’s talk about Hominids!   Humans are in family different from other primates called “hominids”. All hominids are different in size, the way it walks, the skull and its characteristics. A hominid is a type of primate characteristic by bipedalism, relatively long, lower limbs and lack of a tail. That means that the creature walks on two feet and does not have a tail. This family includes only humans and human like ancestors. The main characteristic that separate hominids from other primates are called, bipedalism. Bipedalism means walking primarily upright on two feet. You know how a gorilla walks right? Gorilla’s walk with their backs hunched over and on four feet, this is called knuckle walking. Us humans, we with two feet and our back straight up in the air, that is why were known as bipedalism. Scientists believe that hominid evolution started in Africa, between the time of six and seven million years ago.  As recently as 30,000 years ago two types of hominids may have lived in the same area at the same time. These two types of hominids were humans and Neanderthals. A Neanderthal is a recent hominid; they lived in Europe and western Asia about 230,000 years ago. Neanderthals became extinct for an unknown cause 30,000 years ago. Scientists have a theory that their extinction came from Homo sapiens outcompeting the Neanderthals. Modern humans though are classified as “Homo sapiens”. Homo sapiens is a species of hominids which include humans and their closest ancestor. The earliest Homo sapiens existed 100,000 to 160,000 years ago. Eventually they ended up migrated out of Africa about 40,000 to 100,000 years ago. This is how you got to where you live today. That is all I have I hope that this was a help to you about learning human evolution! Image Sites in order of pictures: Human Evolution: http://hydrodictyon.eeb.uconn.edu/courses/EEB210/evolution.jpg Chimpanzee: http://titania.stockton.edu/stk37683/files/2008/02/chimpanzee.jpg Hominid: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/images/hominids2_big.jpg Neanderthal: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/files/imagecache/news/files/20061031_neander.jpg Timeline: http://www.archaeologyinfo.com/images/phylogeny%20copy.jpg More Websites for funs and facts on human evolution: http://www.becominghuman.org/ and http://www.onelife.com/evolve/manev.html Scientist that sudies human evolution: Stewie James, his website: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1070671/Evolution-stops-Future-Man-look-says-scientist.html  
 * __Human Evolution __**