The process of human evolution, what is the process of human evolution?

The evolutionary process of human beings can be divided into four stages:

1. Early ape-man stage: It lived about 3 million to 1.5 million years ago, and already had the basic characteristics of human beings, able to walk upright, and make simple gravel tools.

2. Late ape-man stage: about 2 million to 300,000 years ago, the body is like a man, the brain is large, can make more advanced paleolithic tools, and began to use fire, such as the Beijing ape man in Zhoukoudian, Beijing, China.

3. Early Homo sapiens (ancient people) stage: 10-200,000 to 50,000 years ago, gradually detached from the characteristics of apes, and very close to modern humans, such as Neanderthals in Germany.

4. Late Homo sapiens (new man) stage: about 4-50,000 years ago, the evolution of human beings at this time has accelerated significantly, and it has been very similar to modern humans in form. For example, in 1933, the cave man on the top of Zhoukoudian Keel Mountain was discovered.

At this time, primitive religions had already arisen and had entered a matriarchal society.

In the late Homo sapiens stage, modern humans began to differentiate and form, and distributed all over the world The origin and development of human beings is a very complex issue, although after the efforts of Darwin and others and more than 100 years later, there are still different opinions and questions.

Humans first evolved in Africa, and most of the evolution of humans took place on the African continent. Because the fossils of early humans who lived between 6 million and 2 million years ago came entirely from Africa.

Currently, most scientists know about 15 to 20 different species of early humans. However, scientists are not entirely consistent in their understanding of the relationship between these species and which species are extinct.

Many early human species, most of which did not leave any surviving descendants. Scientists are also debating how to identify and classify specific species of early humans, as well as the factors that influenced the evolution and extinction of each species.

The earliest migration of early humans from Africa to Asia was probably between 2 million and 1.8 million years ago. They entered Europe relatively late, between 1.5 million and 1 million years ago.

The species of modern humans only appeared in many parts of the world much later. For example, people may have first come to Australia in the last 60,000 years, and the Americas for the first time may have been around 30,000 years ago.

The beginning of agriculture and the rise of the first civilizations took place in the last 12,000 years.

Human evolution originated from forest apes, and developed step by step from primates through a long evolutionary process. It has gone through four stages: ape man, primitive man, sapiens man, and modern man.

Due to the development of archaeology, prehistoric civilization has been gradually denied, and archaeology has most of the evolved hominin fossils. In conjunction with the discoveries of modern biology, it was discovered that genetic DNA is evolutionary, confirming the authenticity of the theory of neutral evolution.

The future of humanity

People have different views on the future of humanity. American scientists have found that human differential genes have risen from 10%.

The results of the scientists' findings suggest a striking trend: people on different continents are genetically more distinct, rather than more similar. Another of their major discoveries is that 7% of genes in the human genome are evolving at an accelerated pace.

Henry Harpentine of the University of Utah pointed out that there has been a lot of genetic evolution in human beings, at least hundreds or even thousands. The team led by Henry Harpentine reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they found that about 1,800 genes in the human genome are in a state of accelerated evolution, which is about 7% of the entire human genome.

Generally speaking, the sign of human appearance is upright walking, and the time of the appearance of ancient humans, some people believe that it should be between about 5 million and 7 million years ago, although this conclusion is currently somewhat debated, but there is no doubt that it is at least about 4 million years old. Since the 20th century, archaeologists and paleoanthropologists have found fossils of ancient humans or remains of tools used by ancient humans in many parts of the world, such as Africa, Asia, and Europe. For example, the 1.7 million-year-old human bone fossil discovered by Yuanmou in China in 1965; The fossilized bones of Australopithecus australopithecus "Lucy", discovered in Ethiopia's Hadar Valley in 1974, were determined to be at least 3 million years old, and so on.

All the evidence points to multiple sources of human origin. The early evolution of humans was very slow, after about millions of years of evolution, only about 200,000 years ago, humans evolved into early Homo sapiens, about 100,000 years ago, humans evolved into late Homo sapiens, and modern humans belong to late Homo sapiens. Obviously, in this long evolutionary process, not all ancient humans can evolve into late Homo sapiens, that is, modern humans.

So where did the modern people scattered around the world today come from? Did they come from the same place, or did they evolve from local hominins, or was there something else? This is a question that anthropologists have been studying for a long time.

Many people now believe that all modern humans in the world are from the African continent, about 200,000 years ago, due to great changes in nature and ecology.

The black pygmies in Kenya in East Africa began to move out of Africa, about 100,000 years ago, they reached the area of the present-day Middle East, and then spread throughout Asia, and about 60,000 years ago, they reached today's America and Australia, gradually replacing the original Homo erectus around the world, and evolved into the common ancestor of modern humans all over the world.