The One Where We Looked At Evolutionary Trees

Date: 6th Feb 2020 @ 12:42pm

What a fun Science lesson we had today!  We learn that before humans evolved, early common ancestors with other mammals walked on all fours, but fossils that have been found tells us that early humans (australopithecines and homo species) ‘evolved’ to walk on two legs (anatomical evidence, but also bipedal footprint fossils). We now understand that we DID NOT evolve from primates but that we simply have common ancestors. We looked at the advantages and disadvantages of home species evolving to walk on two legs (bipedalism) and how they needed to evolve and adapt in order to survive. We learnt a crazy fact too - our closest living relative is a chimpanzee with around 97% identical DNA. Who knew that? Well, we do now! We then looked at how biscuits have evolved over time and what has changed to their characteristics each time. We ordered the biscuits in complexity and described how they have changed - this helped us to understand the evolution process of many living things; such as, cockroaches, ferns, primates and many more.