Ever wondered how Human beings evolved? Well, there are lot many theories. Putting aside the concepts of religions, the sources till date has always been saying that it is the climate change that resulted in the evolution of this super living beings-Humans.
Now, baffling everyone, a new study says that origin of human genus could have occurred by chance and not as it is mentioned above. Many scientists have argued that an influx, described as a “pulse”, of new animal species appears in the African fossil record between 2.8 and 2.5 million years ago, including our own genus Homo.
Though experts believe that it takes a broad-scale event like global climate change to spark the origination of so many diverse new species, this new study, published in the journal Paleobiology, says it is possible the pulse of new species could have occurred by chance.
Andrew Barr from George Washington University has said, “The idea that our genus originated more than 2.5 million years ago as part of a turnover pulse in direct response to climate change has a deep history in paleoanthropology.”
Barr also added, “My study shows that the magnitude of that pulse could be caused by random fluctuations in speciation rates. One implication is that we may need to broaden our search for why our genus arose at that time and place.”
He used computer simulation to model what the fossil record might look like over time in the absence of any climate change and found clusters of species originations that were of similar magnitude to the clusters observed in the fossil record, which means that the random patterns are likely under-credited for their role in speciation fluctuation.
This new-found theory raises the ambiguity in the earlier notions, indicates that the scientists may need to rethink widely-accepted ideas about why human ancestors became smarter and more sophisticated than the rest of living beings on earth.
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