BISC 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Melanoma, Quest University, Sunscreen
1 Nov 2020
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Lab assignment: the evolution of human skin color. Curriculum coordinator & founding faculty, life sciences, quest university, canada. About seven million years ago, humans and chimpanzees shared a common ancestor. Since that time, the lineages leading to chimpanzees and humans have evolved independently from one another. It is generally assumed that the chimpanzee lineage changed less over that time period than the hominin lineage, because the chimpanzee lineage remained in an environment thought to be closer to the ancestral environment. For this reason, chimpanzees are often used as surrogates to infer the physical and behavioral attributes of our common ancestors. The skin of chimps is light and covered with hair. From this observation, it has been inferred that the earliest hominin ancestor was probably light-skinned and covered with hair. Since hominin and chimp lineages diverged, hominin left the protection of trees and adapted to a new environment, the open savannah.
