Darwin's theory organized the vast amount of biological data collected by generations of naturalists up till his times, including the huge and rapidly increasing fund of knowledge of extinct forms of life from fossils in rocks and coal mines and other sites. The process of classifying the world's flora and fauna had been in progress in Europe, particularly in France, since the 18th century. Darwin's theory added a dimension of time to the "family tree" of earth's life forms and provided a way of understanding extinct life forms in relation to living species.Late in the 19th century, other scholars joined Gregor Mendel's pioneering work on genetics to Darwin's theory to provide an explanation of "variation"--why offspring of the same parents are not identical. The later discovery of the structure of DNA in 1956 was further confirming evidence of the general theory. Darwin's theory is thus one of the central ideas of modern biology and its fundamental organizing concept.
What remained was to apply the theory to the issue of human origins. Darwin speculated in his second book, The Descent of Man (1871), that because of their many anatomical similarities, apes and humans must have a remote common ancestor. Darwin suggested in 1871 that the most likely site of human origins was Africa, home of the gorilla and chimpanzee, which he regarded as our closest living relatives.
Subsequent fossil discoveries have borne out Darwin's early observations. At left is a remarkably well preserved skull of Proconsul africanus (sometimes called Dryopithicus africanus or "woodland ape"). This specimen was discovered in 1948 in east Africa. This gibbon-sized animal roamed the forests of the Miocene period roughly 18 million years ago. This creature appeared after monkeys and apes had diverged into separate families of species. Structurally, Proconsul appears to be the best candidate yet discovered to be the origin point of our large "family" of species. That is, Proconsul is probably the distant ancestor from which all modern species of apes and all hominids--human beings included--evolved.
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