The Analysis of the Primates - Essay Example

As concerns the new world monkeys, they mainly come from such groups as marmosets, Cebidae, Atelidae, and Pithecidae. Another classification of the monkey clades is the Catarrhines, consisting of the old world monkey and the apes. The old-world monkeys, in this case, include the Colobinae and Cocopithecinae. During evolution, the primates had to adjust to factors that enhance their vision, hand use, locomotion, intelligence, and the need to care for their young ones socially.

Humans fundamentally use evidence to understand the history of evolution. The evidence in question may be biological or historical, whereas, in biology, the evidence may include genetics and living organisms. On the other hand, historical evidence consists of palaeontology, geology, and paleoanthropology. Since this paper focuses on paleoanthropology, it is necessary to use appropriate geological evidence, like fossils, to unearth the evolutionary history of the primates. Nevertheless, geological preservation processes have simplified the whole procedure of studying the fossil components of old primates. Although many scholars agree that the world is ancient, the history and age of the earth are significant in working out the process and history of evolution using fossils. This is because the old ground has a solid connection to biological evolution. There are techniques that paleoanthropologists use to date the fossils that they recover through geological means. These methods include Radiocarbon dating, U-Series, Radio-potassium, Uranium-Lead dating, Argon-Argon dating, and the Reference Geo-chronological Timescale. The history of paleoanthropology is quite vast, ranging from the Neanderthal skullcap that paleoanthropologists discovered in 1856 AD to the Ardipithecus ramidus skeleton that underwent publication just recently in 2009 AD.

Through fossils research and dating, paleoanthropologists have discovered aspects such as evolutionary species, lines, bushes, and trees. Many a time, many species surround human beings such that it becomes difficult for humans to figure out all of them together with their distinctions. The Savanna hypothesis stipulates that the separation between hominins and certain great apes was due to the movement from the forests into the natural grasslands. Based on this postulation, it is apparent that the environmental separation of the apes played a significant role in determining their evolutionary lineage. More reliable evidence explains that this separation started from the time of Australopithecus, which had distinct features like the reduction of canine size and bipedalism. They mainly used tools to accomplish their missions and were more prevalent in South and Eastern Africa. Then emerged the Homos used more advanced techniques in terms of brain capacity as they used hand axe in addition to lighting fire. They included Homo erectus, which later evolved into Homo sapiens.