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Why are there so many species on Earth?
Just why some groups contain large numbers of species while others don’t has long puzzled biologists. One of the main explanations has been geological age – older groups of organisms are more diverse because they have simply had more time to accumulate greater numbers of species.
Do humans have different species?
According to Smithsonian, there are 21 recognised human species. But other papers list only 10-12 species as humans. Some lists don’t include Denisovans while some don’t have Homo naledi, a hobbit-sized human species discovered in Indonesian caves. This might be because they look more like chimpanzees than us.
What human species lived together?
Long ago, there was a lot more human diversity; Homo sapiens lived alongside an estimated eight now-extinct species of human about 300,000 years ago. As recently as 15,000 years ago, we were sharing caves with another human species known as the Denisovans.
What is the evidence of human evolution?
Evidence of Evolution. Scientists have discovered a wealth of evidence concerning human evolution, and this evidence comes in many forms. Thousands of human fossils enable researchers and students to study the changes that occurred in brain and body size, locomotion, diet, and other aspects regarding the way of life of early human species over
Why are fossils important to study human evolution?
Scientists have discovered a wealth of evidence concerning human evolution, and this evidence comes in many forms. Thousands of human fossils enable researchers and students to study the changes that occurred in brain and body size, locomotion, diet, and other aspects regarding the way of life of early human species over the past 6 million years.
How old is the fossil record of human evolution?
Evidence from the fossil record. The earliest fossils of anatomically modern humans are from the Middle Paleolithic, about 200,000 years ago such as the Omo remains of Ethiopia; later fossils from Es Skhul cave in Israel and Southern Europe begin around 90,000 years ago ( 0.09 million years ago ).
How many species of humans have there been?
When I drew up a family tree covering the last one million years of human evolution in 2003, it contained only four species: Homo sapiens (us, modern humans), H. neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals), H. heidelbergensis (a supposedly ancestral species), and H. erectus (an even more ancient and primitive species).