HISTORY 2720 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Radiometric Dating, Oldowan, Ardipithecus
26 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
Traditional misconceptions: progress that we got better, linear directionality (teleology) - our appearance was straightforward and inevitable. Two important corrections: contingency, evolutionary radiation - variety of branches. More intelligence is not necessarily always better: brains use a lot of energy, instinct is fast. Shrunk as it adapted to island life; reduced cranial size. Us an banaa 1. 5bya; us and chimp 7 mya. Taxonomy - categorizes species according to their genetic relation. Fossil record: teeth can tell us how they eat. Genetic dating: use genes to tell when species diverted. Primate studies: our ancestors probably early on lived similar to how the apes today do socially. From visible similarities to genetic relatedness over time we have moved to phylogeny. Changes in activities - environment and way to survive. Snps and phylogenetic trees - single pieces of dna that don"t seem to matter, a collection can show how it may have diverged and caused a change.
