Evolution-Final Blog

When we first started out evolution section, all I really knew was what people have said and I saw on TV, where they said we evolved from chimps. As I said originally, I still don't believe that we evolved from the chimpanzee. I have gotten a better understanding into what has happened to us though, I believe that early humans were just like us but with diseases that we don't see as much in today's world. So to sum it up, I don't really believe we as a species have evolved at all but we have just had new advances in the world around us.

My Beliefs in a Cladogram

A cladogram shows the connection between species and branches them off into group based on what they have in common and they go back to a common ancestor. If we would make a cladogram based on what we used to believe, that humans evolved from chimps, then we would come off a branch directly from the chimpanzees. This is not what I believe happened at all, I don't personally believe that humans ever evolved, I believe that early humans just had different diseases and nutrition problems that caused them to look how they did and those just don't show up as often in modern humans. So if I made a cladogram off of my beliefs then chimps would be on their own branch and humans would also have their own branch with very little connection between them.

Evolution Tree

After doing our skull lab, we did a evolution tree as a class. We came up with a tree that had the modern chimp on it's own branch and modern humans on the other side on another branch. The human branch started with the Australopithecus, which went to the A. Africanus and the A. Boisei. Then were the Neanderthals and Homo Erectus. Then came the modern humans and Cro-Magnon man. This tree was supported by the discoveries we made when we studied the skulls of these species and put them into groups by similarities in features.