Evidence
The evidence on which scientific accounts of human evolution is based comes from many fields of natural science. The main sources of knowledge about the evolutionary process has traditionally been the fossil record, but since the development of genetics beginning in the 1970s DNA analyses has come to occupy a place of comparable importance. The studies of ontogeny, phylogeny and especially evolutionary developmental biology of both vertebrates and invertebrates offer considerable insight into the evolution of all life, including how humans evolved. The specific study of the origin and life of humans is anthropology, particularly paleoanthropology which focuses on the study of human prehistory.
Read more about this topic: Human Evolution
Famous quotes containing the word evidence:
“Strict rules of evidence would destroy psychoanalysis and literary criticism.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I believe that no characteristic is so distinctively human as the sense of indebtedness we feel, not necessarily for a favor received, but even for the slightest evidence of kindness; and there is nothing so boorish, savage, inhuman as to appear to be overwhelmed by a favor, let alone unworthy of it.”
—Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 B.C.)
“Yet in spite of all they sang in praise of their “Eliza’s reign,” we have evidence that poets may be born and sing in our day, in the presidency of James K. Polk.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)