Friday, September 10, 2010

Of elephants and man....


We used the diagram above, showing the evolutionary lineage of modern elephants, as an example of how the fossil record can be used to trace evolutionary relationships through time. Here is a short article concerning this particular diagram that you might find interesting. It essentially says that humans and chimps split from each other at the same time as modern elephants and mammoths, supporting a hypothesis of rapid speciation, presumably associated with dramatic environmental change, in Africa.

2 comments:

per2COLLIN said...

this a working?

Anonymous said...

If asian elephants and mammoths split around the same time apes and humans split then why have the asian elephants evolved so much slower than humans have? did we just get lucky with our mutations?