How Did Our Ancestors Evolve?발음듣기
How Did Our Ancestors Evolve?
DAVID CHRISTIAN: Here we are in Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea, and we're talking about human ancestors, the ancestors of you and me.발음듣기
Now, that ancestor probably lived about 1.5 billion years ago and was an early form of eukaryote, but you and chimps also share a common ancestor.발음듣기
That ancestor lived much closer to today, a mere seven million years ago, which is just an eye blink in geological time.발음듣기
Taxonomy is the branch of biology that classifies living organisms by their relationships to each other.발음듣기
And what taxonomy does is create huge sort of trees of life, systems of classification that show the relationships between all living organisms.발음듣기
Fossils can tell us a lot about what our ancestors looked like and how they changed over time, but fossils could also tell us a surprising amount about how they lived.발음듣기
We can also use radiometric dating techniques to date fossils so we know when a particular organism lived.발음듣기
Since the 1960s, biologists have discovered that genes... a lot of genes change quite randomly.발음듣기
Now, what this means is by comparing the genes of two species, you can tell roughly when they shared a common ancestor.발음듣기
So we can use genetic dating techniques to check out the evidence we get from fossils about dates.발음듣기
Now, a third type of evidence comes from modern studies of primate societies, particularly the studies of great apes - of gorillas and chimps.발음듣기
We're very close genetically to the great apes, but it's quite probable that our ancestors evolved more rapidly and changed more from the great apes.발음듣기
So what this means is that by studying the societies - the social relationships of chimps and gorillas - we can learn a lot about how our ancestors probably lived.발음듣기
To study the history of our species let's begin by going back 65 million years to the time when the dinosaurs were wiped out.발음듣기
After a mass extinction event like this, evolution very often happens very, very fast indeed.발음듣기
This is because the surviving species tend to experiment with all the new niches that are left empty by the removal of other species.발음듣기
Now, we know that something like this happened because within ten million years of the disappearance of the dinosaurs, we find a whole range of new mammal species.발음듣기
Now, if you've ever climbed trees, you'll know the sort of skills you need to climb them without falling out.발음듣기
Now, this is partly to process all that visual information, but it's also partly because a lot of primates seem to have really liked fruit and fruit tend to be harder to find than leaves.발음듣기
Somewhat confusingly, there's a family called the hominids, which is smaller, within the hominoid group.발음듣기
The hominids include the great apes: orangutans, gorillas, two species of chimps, and you and me.발음듣기
We're so similar to apes that even Linnaeus, the founder of modern taxonomy, reluctantly classified us humans with the great apes.발음듣기
If you compare the genes of humans and chimps, you find that about 98% of those genes are identical, and that's why modern biologists are convinced that humans and chimps shared a common ancestor about seven million years ago.발음듣기
One possibility is that our ancestors lived in Eastern Africa, which was drier, so there were grassy savanna lands rather than forests.발음듣기
And also, bipedalism freed the hands to manipulate stones or perhaps even throw them at an enemy.발음듣기
Now, after an evolutionary radiation, this sort of winnowing of species is fairly common as one species that can adapt better than the others becomes a sort of standard model and the others die out.발음듣기
But it's also possible that our ancestors played a role in eliminating our evolutionary cousins.발음듣기
One group of species or genus, as the biologists call it, was the Australopithecines or southern apes.발음듣기
The Australopithecines flourished in Africa between about four million and one million years ago.발음듣기
Best known of all the Australopithecines is Lucy, an individual whose remains were found in 1974 in the Hadar Valley in Ethiopia by an American paleontologist, Don Johanson.발음듣기
Lucy had a brain about the size of a chimp's brain and stood about three and a half feet tall.발음듣기
More similar to us is a species known as Homo habilis, which flourished between about 2.5 and 1.5 million years ago.발음듣기
The first remains of a Homo habilis were found by the son of the paleontologist Louis Leakey in Olduvai Gorge in the Rift Valley in Africa.발음듣기
Louis Leakey was absolutely convinced that a crucial, key component of being human was the ability to make tools.발음듣기
So he immediately thought, "These are humans," and he classified them within the genus Homo using the Latin word for human.발음듣기
Even more similar to us is another group of species known variously as Homo ergaster/erectus.발음듣기
They had larger brains than Homo habilis, and they were almost as tall as us, and they traveled.발음듣기
They made beautiful stone tools and they traveled into a wide variety of niches, different environments; and yet their stone tools hardly changed over a million years.발음듣기
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