HUMAN EVOLUTION

The Geological Ages of the Earth

Era	Period	Sub period	About ___ Years Ago
Cenozoic	Quaternary	Pleistocene	5,000,000
Cenezoic	Quaternary	Pliocene
Cenezoic	Tertiary	Miocene
Cenezoic	Tertiary	Oligocene
Cenezoic	Tertiary	Eocene
Cenezoic	Tertiary	Paleocene	70,000,000
Mesozoic	Cretaceous		135,000,000
Mesozoic	Jurassic		180,000,000
Mesozoic	Triassic		225,000,000

SOME IMPORTANT HUMAN FOSSIL FORMS

Animals are classified into different groups and sub groups. These are kingdom, phylum, class. order, family, genus and species. These are subdivided into smaller units using the terms "sub", "super" and "infra". The last two, genus and species are the Linnean classification forms. For contemporary humans the genus and species are Homo sapiens. The genus is ALWAYS capitalized.

	Human	Pig
Kingdom	Animal	Aniaml
Phylum	Chordata	Chordata
Class	Mammalia (Mammal)	Mammalia (Mammal)
Order	Primate	Ungulate
Family	hominid
Genus	Homo	Sus
Species	sapiens	scrofa

When it comes to humans the classification becoems a bit more complicated. The Order Primate, which includes a number of animals such as prosimians (lemirs, lorises tarsiers and so on), platyrhines (New World monkeys which have nostrils that point up) and catarhines (which have pinched nostrils like people).

Human fall under the catarhines. Within this group are the cercopithecoids (Old World monkeys) and hominoids (human like things including apes and people). Within the hominoids are the pongids (the lesser apes - gibbon and siamang) and the great apes - the orangutan, gorilla and chimpanzee) homininds (human-ish). Within this last group are the hominines or "True people". On a chart, these would appear as follows:

superfamily				Hominoids
family	Hominids				Pongids
subfamily	hominines	australopithecines
genus	Homo
species	sapiens erectus			Pongo	Gorilla	Pan

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