Evolution Timeline

By CSA
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    Evolution Timeline

    By: Cydney Anderson

  • Zoonomia

    Darwin's grandfather asked, "Would it be too bold to imagine ... that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one-living fillament?"

  • Gas Street Ligh in London

  • Cuvier

    Naturalist Georges Cuvier attempted to explain fossiles found in the early 19th century. He said that great flood and earthquakes wiped out certain life in the distant past.

  • Lyell

    Charles Lyell argues that slow-moving, gradual porcesses explain Earth's geology. His mentor wrote that Earth's history has "no vestige of a beginning. No prospect of an end."

  • Evolution Accepted

    Only a few years after On the Origin of Specles is published, evolution is mainstream science Magazines and newpapers promote evolution. Darwin's theory constinues to be doubted.

  • Descent of Man

    Darwin now unabashedly takes on human evolution. HIs new book stresses the importance of "secual selection" in driving the evolution of life. To pass along traits to future generations, individuals mush be not only fit to survive, but also irresistible to the opposite sex.

  • Horse Fossils

    Othniel Charles Marsh had discovered stunning fossils of ancient horses. Thomas Huxley and Marsh piece together the story of the evoultion of the modern horse from a four-toed ancestor. Huxley and Marsh predicted that a more ancient, five-toed animal likely existed, and months later, fossils of such an animals, called Eohippus, are discovered.

  • Roadioactivity

    Physicist Antonie Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity and this leads to a stunning calculations of Earth's age. New rock-dating techniques show that Earth is more than 4.3 billion years old.

  • Robert E. Peary reaches North Pole

  • Einstein postulates his General Theory of Relativity

  • BBC Founded

  • E.P. Hubble Calculates Distance to Star Nebula

  • Man-Like Ape

    Rayond Dart announced that a prehistoric "man-like ape" had been found in a limestone quarry at Taungs, South Africa. The fossils were found with a skull of a ancient baboon that had a mysterious opening. Dart made the speculation that the clever "man-like ape" killed the baboon and extracted its brain for food.

  • James Chadwick Discovers Neutron

  • Magnetic Recording Tape Invented

  • DDT

    DDT was widely used in the early 1940s. It was primarily used to batle the mosquitos that spreads malaria. Just as the Darwinian theory would predict, those insects with traits that allowed them to survive increase in numbers.

  • First Atomic Bomb detonated in New Mexico

  • Cinerama Invented

  • Origins of Life

    With electric currents to act as lightning and a soup of inogranic chemicals to simulate the conitions of ancient Earth, a young graduate students named STanley Miller produces amino actids -- key chemical building blocks of life. This experiemtn, and other to follow, indicate that the first life on Earth may have arisen through natural processes.

  • J.K. Galbraight The Affluent Society