Word: ancestors
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...them birds. Second, DNA is turning out to be a great deal more "conserved" than anybody ever imagined. So-called Hox genes, which lay down the body plan in an embryo, are so similar in people and fruit flies that they can be used interchangeably, yet the last common ancestor of people and fruit flies lived about 600 million years...
...only does such a thing seem extremely difficult, but it could also be a little risky. What if you prevented Caesar's assassination and changed history? What if you accidentally killed someone who happened to be your own ancestor? Then you wouldn't have been born, and couldn't have killed your ancestor, so you could be born after all to go back and...well, you get the idea...
...acknowledges, however, that it will take more than a few foot bones to establish Eosimias as the common ancestor of monkeys, apes and man. Some experts, in fact, say that Eosimias is probably closer to the tarsiers, which split off earlier from the monkey-to-human branch. "So far, we don't have the smoking gun," argues anthropologist Eric Delson of the City University of New York's Lehman College. He would be convinced, he says, by a full skull showing fused eye sockets and forehead. (By contrast, lemurs have gaps in both places...
Before this period, human ancestors inhabited the trees, and size differences between males and females were much more pronounced. Wrangham said that, anytime during the Homo period, after the harnessing of fire, if a human ancestor were to put on modern clothes, a hat, and strut down Manhattan, he would not be noticed...
...genome is a sort of autobiographical record, written in "genetish," of all the vicissitudes and inventions that have characterized the history of our species and its ancestors since the dawn of life. Genes have already told us that we are the closest relatives of chimpanzees; that the common ancestor of fruit flies and people was a 600 million-year-old segmented worm with the ability to learn; that the Basques are as unrelated to other Eurasians as their language implies and may be descended from indigenous European hunter-gatherers. Genes can even tell us a bit about "LUCA," the Last...