Among the major sources of evidence are sediment cores from the ocean bottom. They preserve the fossils of tiny organisms called foraminifera. By measuring oxygen in the skeletons of these organisms, scientists can calculate fluctuations in temperature and moisture over millions of years. A lot! Since Darwin died in , findings from many fields have confirmed and greatly expanded on his ideas.
Some members of both religious and scientific communities consider evolution to be opposed to religion. But others see no conflict between religion as a matter of faith and evolution as a matter of science. Still others see a much stronger and constructive relationship between religious perspectives and evolution.
Many religious leaders and organizations have stated that evolution is the best explanation for the wondrous variety of life on Earth. Many scientists are people of faith who see opportunities for respectful dialogue about the relationship between religion and science. Some people consider science and faith as two separate areas of human understanding that enrich their lives in different ways.
This Museum encourages visitors to explore new scientific findings and decide how these findings complement their ideas about the natural world. In science, gaps in knowledge are the driving force behind the ongoing study of the natural world and how it arose. The science of human origins is a vibrant field in which new discoveries continually add to our understanding of how we became human. You can learn about some of the most recent findings in this exhibit.
Societies worldwide express their beliefs through a wide diversity of stories about how humans came into being. These stories reflect the universal curiosity people have about our origins. For millennia, they have played a vital role in helping people develop an identity and an understanding of themselves as well as of their community.
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Skip to navigation Skip to content. This site is being redeveloped. For all the latest ABC Science content click here. Site Navigation Video Audio Photos. How can we be descended from monkeys if there are monkeys around today? All primates alive today, including mountain gorillas in Uganda, howler monkeys in the Americas, and lemurs in Madagascar, have proven that they can thrive in their natural habitats.
While extreme adaptability lets humans manipulate very different environments to meet our needs, that ability isn't enough to put humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder. Take, for instance, ants. While ants haven't developed writing though they did invent agriculture long before we existed , they're enormously successful insects.
They just aren't obviously excellent at all of the things humans tend to care about, which happens to be the things humans excel at. Our ancestors' divergence from ancestral chimps is a good example. Some scientists hypothesize that language developed as a means of establishing lasting social relationships. Even a form of communication as casual as gossip provides an ingenious social tool: Suddenly, we become aware of crucial information that we never would have known otherwise.
We know who needs a favor; who's available; who's already taken; and who's looking for someone -- information that, from an evolutionary perspective, can mean the difference between failure and success. So, it is certainly possible that evolutionary forces have influenced the development of human capacities for social interaction and the development of culture. While scientists tend to agree about the general role of evolution in culture, there is still great disagreement about its specific contributions.
There is great debate about how we are related to Neanderthals, close hominid relatives who coexisted with our species from more than , years ago to about 28, years ago. Some data suggest that when anatomically modern humans dispersed into areas beyond Africa, they did so in small bands, across many different regions. As they did so, according to this hypothesis, humans merged with and interbred with Neanderthals, meaning that there is a little Neanderthal in all modern Europeans.
Scientific opinion based on other sets of data, however, suggests that the movement of anatomically modern humans out of Africa happened on a larger scale. These movements by the much more culturally and technologically advanced modern humans, the hypothesis states, would have been difficult for the Neanderthals to accommodate; the modern humans would have out-competed the Neanderthals for resources and driven them to extinction.
Evolution describes the change over time of all living things from a single common ancestor.
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