Snowy Plover Chick: Timeline for Human Origins, Early Evidence of Culture

Here's a timeline for human origins:


3.5 billion years ago - life evolves - (how?)

560 - 515 mya (million years ago) - Cambrian explosion - little cordate creature (and something like 23 phyla) in the Burgess Shale fossil beds in Canada; something like this may have been our ancestor (see Gould's "Wonderful Life")

(250-) 130 mya - emergence of angiosperms (flowering plants) - rich expansion of potential food sources for mammals

{150-145 mya - Archaeopteryx - first fossil evidence for how flight evolved}

65 mya - KT extinction event (Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event) - dinosaurs become extinct - some small mammals and reptiles survive

7-5 mya - homo speciation - line separates from common human, chimpanzee and gorilla ancestor

2.9-2.1 mya - first evidence for stone tool use (flint knapping)

200,000 years ago - emergence of humans - DNA evidence

Origins of language are lost in time - possibly occurring sometime here - development of larynx?

170,000 years ago - mitochondrial Eve (the woman who is defined as the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) for all currently living humans - roughly 8,000 generations ago) - development of human line

75,000 years ago - first known art - tiny, drilled, snail shells from the Blombos cave in South Africa - forty-one shells of the mollusc scavenger Nassarius kraussianus, with holes and marks in similar positions for a necklace (?) have been found in a cave overlooking the Indian Ocean

70,000 years ago - humans begin migration out of Africa (out of Africa hypothesis)

35,000 years ago - bone flute - first solid evidence of musical instrument

30,000 years ago - Neanderthals disappear -
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal#Fate_of_the_Neanderthals)

24,000 years ago - Venus of Willendorf

17,000 years ago - Lascaux murals

10,000 years ago - agricultural revolution

5,500 years ago - first evidence for writing

{2,700 years ago - epic poet Homer - oral tradition - and the "Odyssey" and the "Iliad" are written down}

{2,500 years ago - Laozi - "Tao te Ching"}

1859 - Charles Darwin publishes "On the Origin of Species" - evolution by natural selection as idea takes form

{1972 - Herbert Benson MD publishes "The Relaxation Response"}

{And around 1.3 - 8 million + species have come through millions of generations at the same time ~ DNA is amazing}.

And there are potentially 10s of thousands of generations ahead for all species.


And here's a phylogenetic tree of early human phylogeny from the Smithsonian Museum: anthropology.si.edu/humanorigins/ha/a_tree.html


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Charadrius alexandrinus (Linnaeus 1758) ~

eol.org/pages/1049344

&

homepage.mac.com/cjbowdish/COPR042807/pictures/picture-4.jpg

~ Snowy Plover