![]() Such fossils are often referred to as “missing links”, because they present the first physical evidence that lends credibility to previous theoretical speculations about our past. ![]() The discovery of a yet unknown human fossil, therefore, still receives tremendous attention from the media and public and is often presented as shining a new light on our evolution, questioning previous interpretations, and presenting a new link between various branches of our evolutionary tree. Instead, our ancestry is rather a thicket of branches, with several species co-existing at any given time, where we anatomically modern humans are the sole survivors. Over the last century it became clear that human evolution follows no straight line leading from a common ancestor with chimpanzees to contemporary modern humans. But despite the large number of remains, the reconstruction of the human family tree is far from trivial. They give scientists the chance to reconstruct the ancestral stages of our lineage and to define various important changes in our morphology during the course of our evolution. Hand in hand with Darwin's book, the Neandertal fossil started a heated debate about the evolution of our species that continued over several decades before more evidence in the form of human fossils was discovered.īy now, more than 1,000 human fossils have been found spanning the last 7 million years of our evolution. In 1856, three years before Darwin published his book, the first evidence for such ancestral human forms was brought forward, with the discovery of a human fossil in the Neander Valley in Germany by quarry workers. Darwin's work implied that humans are not an exception to the processes that drive evolution, such as natural selection, but rather that we evolved from primate ancestors over millions of years, leaving behind a number of extinct ancestral forms. Yet it wasn't until the middle of the 19th century that the scientific debate about the origin of our species took off, sparked by a single short hint in On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin that challenged the broadly accepted view of the time that humans were created by a divine entity. In almost all cultures and religions one finds some form of creation myth explaining how their tribe or people came into existence, ranging from the Mayan god Heart-of-Sky that after several failed attempts finally made the true men from maize to the biblical god that created man from wet clay and women from Adam's rib. Humans are naturally fascinated by questions concerning our own origin, not just where we come from but what made us the way we are. Reader J (2011) Missing Links: In Search of Human Origins.
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