Hirohito was the emperor of Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War which became World War 2 (1931 to 1945). Though he was supposed to be an absolute monarch (an emperor who can make all the laws and rules), most of the power in the Japanese Government during this time was held by Japan's Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō and the military. His role in WW2 is controversial.
After Japan's defeat in the war, the role of emperor changed. The emperor became a symbol of the state.
Hirohito was the first emperor to travel outside Japan. He visited Europe in 1971 and he traveled to the United States in 1975.
Emperor Showa died of small intestine cancer and was succeeded by his son, Prince Akihito.
The state funeral for the late emperor was an international event. World leaders attending the funeral included U.S. President George H. W. Bush, French President François Mitterrand, and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Emperor Shōwa is buried in the Imperial Mausoleum in Hachiōji, along with Emperor Taishō.
In an overview of writings by and about Hirohito, OCLC/WorldCat includes roughly 900+ works in 1,500 publications in 15 languages and 31,000 library holdings .
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Human evolution
Human evolution is about the origin of human beings. All humans belong to the same species, which has spread from its birthplace in Africa to almost all parts of the world. Its origin in Africa is proved by the fossils which have been found there.
The term 'human' in this context means the genus "Homo". However, studies of human evolution usually include other hominids, such as the Australopithecines, from which the genus "Homo" had diverged (split) by about 2.3 to 2.4 million years ago in Africa. The first "Homo sapiens", the ancestors of today's humans, evolved around 200,000 years ago.
It was known for centuries that man and the apes were related. At heart, their anatomy is similar, despite many superficial differences. This was the reason why Buffon and Linnaeus, in the 18th century, put them together in one family. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution says that such basic structural similarity comes from the common origin of the group. The apes and man are close relatives, and are primates: the order of mammals which includes monkeys, apes, lemurs and tarsiers.
The great apes live in tropical rainforests. It is thought that human evolution started when a group of apes (now called the australopithecines) began to live more in the savannah. A savannah is more open, with trees, shrubs and grass. This group started walking on two legs. They began to use their hands to carry things. Life in the open was different, and there was a big advantage in having better brains. Their brains grew larger, and they began to make simple tools. This process began at least 5 million years ago. We have fossils of two or three different groups of walking apes, and one was the ancestor of humans.
The biological name for "human" or "man" is "Homo". The modern human species is called "Homo sapiens". "Sapiens" means "thought". "Homo sapiens" means "the thinking man".
Paleoanthropology looks at ancient human fossils, tools, and other signs of early human life. It began in the 19th century with the discovery of a skull of "Neanderthal man" in 1856.
By 1859, zoologists had known for a long time that humans are, in their anatomy, similar to the great apes. There are also differences: humans can speak, for example. But the similarities are more basic than the differences. Humans also have features with a much older history, from early in the life of vertebrates.
The idea that species are caused by evolution had been proposed before Darwin, but his book gave much evidence, and many were persuaded by it. The book was "On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection", published in November 1859. In this book, Darwin wrote about the idea of evolution in general, rather than the evolution of humans. "Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history", was all Darwin wrote on the subject. Nevertheless, the implication of the theory was clear to readers at the time.
Several people discussed the evolution of humans. Among them were Thomas Huxley and Charles Lyell. Huxley convincingly showed many of the similarities and differences between humans and apes in his 1863 book "Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature". When Darwin published his own book on the subject, "The Descent of Man, and selection in relation to sex", the idea of human evolution was already well-known. The theory was controversial. Even some of Darwin's supporters (such as Alfred Russel Wallace and Charles Lyell) did not like the idea that human beings have evolved their impressive mental capacities and moral sensibilities through natural selection.
Since the 18th century, scientists thought the great apes to be closely related to human beings. In the 19th century, they speculated that the closest living relatives of humans were either chimpanzees or gorillas. Both live in central Africa in tropical rainforests. In fact, chimpanzees are closest to us. Biologists believed that humans share a "common ancestor" with other African great apes and that fossils of these ancestors would be found in Africa, which they have been. It is now accepted by virtually all biologists that humans are not only similar to the great apes, but actually are great apes.
The issue was confirmed by late 20th century studies on the sequences of proteins and genes in apes and man. These studies showed that man shares about 95 to 98% of these structures with chimpanzees. This is a much closer relationship than with any other type of animal, and fully supports the ideas put forward in the 19th century by Darwin and Huxley.
Primates have diversified in habitats such as trees and bushes. They have many features which are adaptations to their environment. Here are some of those traits:
Not all primates have these anatomical traits, nor is every trait unique to primates. Primates are frequently highly social, live in groups with 'flexible dominance hierarchies'.
Closely related animals almost always have closely related parasites. This usually comes about because parasites evolve with their hosts, and when host populations split, their parasites split also. It is also possible for parasites to get from one species to another. Two of the most serious parasitic infections of humans in Africa have originated in apes. Each may have been transferred to humans by a single cross-species event.
There are several species of mosquito, and several species of the malarial parasite "Plasmodium". The most serious type, "P. falciparum", which kills many millions of people each year, originated in gorillas. It is now virtually certain that chimpanzees are the source of HIV-1, the major cause of AIDS. This information is got by the sequence analysis of ape and human viruses.
The relevance of this to evolution is that our physiology is so close to the apes that their parasites were able to transfer to humans with great success. Humans have much less resistance to these parasites, which are ancient in origin, but comparatively new to our species.
It was not until the 1920s that hominid fossils were discovered in Africa. In 1924, Raymond Dart described "Australopithecus africanus". The specimen was called the Taung Child, an australopithecine infant discovered in a cave deposit being mined for concrete at Taung, South Africa. The remains were a remarkably well-preserved tiny skull and a cast of the inside of the individual's skull. Although the brain was small (410 cm³), its shape was rounded, unlike that of chimpanzees and gorillas, and more like a modern human brain. Also, the specimen had short canine teeth, and the position of the foramen magnum was evidence of bipedal locomotion. All of these traits convinced Dart that the Taung baby was a bipedal human ancestor, a transitional form between apes and humans.