Hi everyone,

There's a recent article in "Nature" describing the discovery of a 6-7 million year old skull in central Africa that appears to be the oldest link in the chain of evolution of humans. The web page also has links to some other classic papers in the study of human origins and evolution.

http://www.nature.com/nature/ancestor/index.html

As a way of putting things in perspective, I like to think of time periods in human evolution in terms of the number of human lifetimes it would take to cover a given period. So for example if we take 50 years as a rough historical average human lifetime, we could think of passing a torch of knowledge in 50 year increments from one person to the next and providing a continuous link from the present back to any time in history we want to consider. To get back to the person whose skull is described in the Nature article would then require a chain of a little over 100,000 people. By comparison, we'd only need about 100 people to take us back to a time before written history. So it's amazing to think what a small fraction (100 people compared to 100,000 people) of our real history is the recorded history that we know much of anything about. And of course both of these time periods are very small compared to the history of life on earth or the history of the universe.

Happy pondering :-)
Todd