East side story: the origin of humankind.
@article{Coppens1994EastSS,
title={East side story: the origin of humankind.},
author={Yves Coppens},
journal={Scientific American},
year={1994},
volume={270 5},
pages={
88-95
}
}Humans are creatures whose roots lie in the animals. Accordingly, we find ourselves at the tip of one of the branches of an immense tree of life, a tree that has been developing and growing ever more diverse over a period of four billion years. From an evolutionary standpoint, it is important to locate the place and the time that our branch separated from the rest of the tree. It is these questions that the present article attempts to answer. When, where and why did the branch that led to us…
109 Citations
The ‘East Side Story’ twenty years later
- Geography
- 2000
The recent discoveries of upper Miocene hominoids in Africa suggest that the geographic aspect is the least important one, whereas the environmental and chronological ingredients can still be considered as crucial factors involved in the divergence between African apes and hominids.
Toward the Emergence of Hominids
- Geography, Environmental Science
- 2002
The main subject of this article is fossil hominoids, and some recent findings of early hominids are also mentioned to at the end.
Palaeoanthropology and the Evolutionary Place of Humans in Nature
- Geography
- 2005
Along with this new research on the basal hominids has been a renewed interest about what it means to be Homo sapiens, molecular and fossil data shows that Africa was also the authors' homeland, and that all people today are descended from a small founder population in existence there between 50,000 and 200,000 years ago.
Fossil apes and human evolution
- Biology, GeographyScience
- 2021
The morphology of fossil apes was varied and it is likely that the last shared ape ancestor had its own set of traits, different from those of modern humans and modern apes, both of which have been undergoing separate suites of selection pressures.
Environmental Changes and Their Impacts on Life: A Paleontological Approach
- Geography
- 2016
39. By the way, this reasoning can be extended to oppositions between different human populations, given that our own species was born from a single, extremely recent African population (on the scale…
Man's Closeness to the Apes Argues for a Soul
- Biology
- 1999
The fields of molecular biology and genetics have opened the authors' eyes to the incredible complexity and fascinity of life; the work sequencing the human genome, the fifteen year Human Genome Project, is actually ahead of schedule.
First fossil chimpanzee
- Biology, GeographyNature
- 2005
These fossils, from the Kapthurin Formation, Kenya, show that representatives of Pan were present in the East African Rift Valley during the Middle Pleistocene, where they were contemporary with an extinct species of Homo.
Southern Africa: a cradle of evolution.
- Environmental Science, Geography
- 2004
It is likely that the early onset of arid biotopes in the Namib arose well before they occurred anywhere else in Africa, and started a long period of adaptation to semi-arid, arid and hyper-arids conditions, well removed from similarBiotopes in other parts of the world.
Certain medical problems resulting from evolutionary processes: bipedalism as an example
- Biology
- 2015
A brief overview is given of the most important anatomical challenges that these novel locomotory patterns required to be enegretically efficient are, as seen in the comparison between living African apes and humans.