Human Biological Evolution

People who study this field are called paleontologists. They are involved in through search of traits and roots in human behavior. Paleoanthropology involves using scientific means to discover and investigate how humans have evolved over millions of years. Traits are well traced to the place where they came from or how it was lost in human history. However, this topic brings up a lot of heated debates in religious circles as many religious people see it as unfit. The human tree is given the name Homo Evolution process occurs when there is a change in the DNA chemical component of the species. This component is passed from one generation to the other. When it is changed in one generation, the continuous generation has a differentiating characteristic from the original species.

DNA is composed of genes and they represent a certain chemical code in a species. This code is referred to as the information and it contains the formulae of how certain trait will be influenced. Through this migration, they gain another set traits to make them survive in the new habitat. Environmental changes is another factor which makes species evolve. When climatic conditions in a habitat change, it changes the environment surrounding the species. This forces the species change some of their traits to adapt to the new environment (Higham et al. Evolution of man Evolution of man is discussed in depth in the book published by Charles Darwin in 1859 called Origin of Species. Archaeological works from these scientists started to be accepted and be given a scientific explanation.

Their works started to be divided into two categories, history and pre-history. Pre-history usually involved a deep history of man and it documented about his early days of evolution. Among the first works to be published about man’s evolution was Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859 and Descent of Man in 1871, Geological Evidences to the Antiquity of Man by Charles Lyell in 1871, Evidence as to the Man’s place in Nature by Thomas Henry Huxley in 1863 and Pre-historic Times of John Lubbock in 1865. Among the first evidence of the evolution of man in these books was the discovery of Neanderthal man in the Gilbrata, France, German and Spain. Fossils from Africa kept being discovered and this forced the scientists to look for the ancestry of early man from there.

This was not enough to convince all paleoanthropologists that man originated from a single Ape in one particular place in the world. Some supported out of Africa theory which suggested that the origin of man is from one large hominid while the others argued that all man originated from multiple hominids who were scattered all over the world. The out of Africa theory supported that the modern day humans originated from a single hominid which was located in Africa. In 1987, there were more than 11 hominid fossils which were discovered in Africa leading to the dropping of earlier theory of multiregional theory of human evolution. DNA tracing also enabled paleoanthropologist to determine the species who shared a common ancestor. A good example is the comparison of the chimpanzees and the man.

Through the use of DNA comparison, scientists established that they shared a common ancestor (Kellis et al. , 2014 ) Genetics also enabled scientist to make conclusions about the early man. It showed that at some points in the population man, there was temporary or no growth, reductions on the general population, and other bottlenecks experienced in a population growth. Species which do not develop new traits depending on the change of the habitat conditions are naturally wiped out. Darwin called this survival for the fittest through natural selection of species (McLean et al. Darwin had the following observations on the natural selection theory; 1. He discovered that trait was inherited from parent to all other offspring’s. He discovered this but he never knew what caused it to be inherited.

The weak people in the society were wept out during the times of famine. Increased competition was another factor which made the early man migrate. During the migration, weaklings also died along the way of migration. During the migrations, the man also had to develop other traits to adapt to various types of altitudes. Lastly, during the time of diseases, people with the weak alleles were wept out in the population and only the strong alleles survived (Campbell, 2017). , Snyder, M. P. , Bernstein, B. E. , Kundaje, A. , Trinkaus, E. & O’higgins, P. The earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans in northwestern Europe. Nature, 479(7374), 521. McLean, C. & Wenger, A. M. Human-specific loss of regulatory DNA and the evolution of human-specific traits. Nature, 471(7337), 216. Stringer, C.