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The evidence on which scientific accounts of human evolution are based comes from many fields of natural science. The main source 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.
The discovery of human antiquity was a major achievement of science in the middle of the 19th century, and the foundation of scientific paleoanthropology.The antiquity of man, human antiquity, or in simpler language the age of the human race, are names given to the series of scientific debates it involved, which with modifications continue in the 21st century.
The timeline of human evolution outlines the major events in the evolutionary lineage of the modern human species, Homo sapiens, throughout the history of life, beginning some 4 billion years ago down to recent evolution within H. sapiens during and since the Last Glacial Period.
The Neanderthal DNA found in modern human genomes has long raised questions about ancient interbreeding. New studies offer a timeline of when that occurred and when ancient humans left Africa.
The only human fossils found before the discovery of Java Man in the 1890s were either of anatomically modern humans or of Neanderthals that were too close, especially in the critical characteristic of cranial capacity, to modern humans for them to be convincing intermediates between humans and other primates. [108]
The study of human history has a long tradition and early precursors were already practiced in the ancient period as attempts to provide comprehensive accounts of the history of the world. [ab] Most research before the 20th century focused on histories of individual communities and societies after the prehistoric period.
In ancient times, culture and knowledge were passed through oral tradition. The development of writing further enabled the preservation of knowledge and culture, allowing information to spread accurately. The earliest scientific traditions of the ancient world developed in the Ancient Near East, with Ancient Egypt and Babylonia in Mesopotamia.
[12] [15] [16] [189] The Scientific Revolution is a convenient boundary between ancient thought and classical physics, and is traditionally held to have begun in 1543, when the books De humani corporis fabrica (On the Workings of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius, and also De Revolutionibus, by the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, were first ...