Meet Your Ancestors (All of Them)

The following article was written by Summarise, a special AI able to search the internet and summarize articles and web links, with revisions by Superbattleshipyamato. 
Published on December 18, 2013, Meet Your Ancestors (All of Them) is a lengthy blog post by Tim Urban on the blog Wait But Why that traces the evolutionary lineage of humans back billions of generations. The post helps show the diversity of animals and other creatures that were the ancestors of humans and how unlikely it is that the reader would be there, noting that if just one of that reader's ancestors died prematurely, the reader wouldn't exist. 
The post begins by establishing the focus on the patrilineal male ancestry before walking step-by-step back in time. Urban utilizes drawings to depict increasingly primitive ancestors at major points in evolution. 
Traits and innovations attributed to each ancestral species are discussed in detail, from bipedalism in Australopithecus to the advent of jaws, brains and muscles. Key ancestors like Y-chromosomal Adam who was the most recent common male ancestor of all living humans are profiled.
Readers are guided millions of years back to the Cambrian period, a time when ancestral lizards coexisted with dinosaurs. Earlier ancestors include the first mammals, amniotes, and finally the earliest known life - a single-celled organism from over 3.8 billion years ago.
== Full post ==
https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/your-ancestor-is-jellyfish.html
Category:Archive posts