How Humans Evolved!
Primates: The order of mammals that includes humans
Key Features of Primates: Grasping fingers and toes, and binocular vision.
Prosimian: Primates that survived include lemurs, lorises, and tarsiers.
Anthropoid: Higher primates that include money, apes, and humans.
Hominids: Humans and their direct ancestors
Hominoids: Gibbons, orangutans, chimps, gorilla
New World Monkeys: South American descendants of African ancestors
•All are arboreal, have flat spreading noses, and prehensile tails.
Old World Monkeys: Descendants of the ancestral anthropoids that remained in
Africa. None have prehensile tails.•Include both ground dwelling and arboreal species.
African Apes: Evolved more recently and are the closest living relatives to humans.
Chimpanzees: Are most closely related to humans than gorillas
Bipedalism: Hominids began walking upright
Knuckling Walking:
Genus Australopithecus:The first humans
Homo habilis: Came second, had a larger brain volume, associated with tools , but was similarly shorter in statue
Homo rudolfensis: Specimen that has a larger brain capacity than H. habilis
Homo ergaster: Specimen that has larger brain than H. rudolfensis and a skeleton more like humans and less like australopithecines
Homo erectus: walked tall/erect, large brain, lived over million years longer than any human species
Modern Humans: H. heidelbergensis, H. neanderthalensis, and H. sapiens
Homo sapiens Evolution: Recently Out Of Africa model vs Multiregional Hypothesis
Neanderthals: short, stocky, powerful build
This species of modern human was common in Europe and Asia around 70,000 years ago.
•They made diverse tools and lived in huts or caves.
•They did not interbreed with members of
Homo sapiens
Cro-Magnons:
•Homo sapiens that replaced Neanderthals
•Fossils date back as late as 100,000 years ago in Europe.
•They appear to have completely replaced the Neanderthals around 34,000 years ago.
•They used sophisticated tools and likely had full language capabilities.