ARCH 131 Lecture Notes - Thylacine, Eurasian Wolf, Divergent Evolution

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Archaeology
• Course: ARCH 131
• Professor: Dennis Sandgathe

Document Summary

Although for this course we are mainly interested in the emergence of humans, this was simply the end of a long process that included some important and consistent trends. We humans, and our immediate hominin ancestors, have many characteristics that began to emerge many millions of years ago among our distant primate ancestors. It"s important to have some understanding of the bigger picture of primate evolution. However, before we continue, there are a few more important terms dealing with long-term evolutionary processes that we need to know: Adaptive radiation is the relatively rapid process of speciation resulting from a species moving to fill new or different ecological niches. Adaptive radiation events usually follow a major change in the environmental major climate change for example which makes new regions available to species that previously wouldn"t survive there. Over the last 10 million years there have been a number of migrations of animals moving between north america and asia or between.