This type of chart is kinda confusing and misleading to people outside the scientific communities. Evolution is not like a ladder as represented in this figure, but instead is more like a tree.
The correct interpretation would be "N millions of years ago there was a common ancestor between the coelacanth and human" But this doesn't mean that the coelacanth is out ancestor.
Just to give a really good book, Tree Thinking by Stacey D. Smith is a really awesome resource (only the first chapter is needed to understand the concept of tree)
More like an upside down tree / Christmas tree if you look at the Burgess Shale - Gould
Yes, the evolutionary implications of the Burgess Shale suggest that evolution is more like a “bushy Christmas tree” or even a tangled thicket, rather than the traditional, linear “tree of life” often depicted in textbooks. This idea is largely influenced by Stephen Jay Gould’s interpretation in Wonderful Life (1989), where he examines the Burgess Shale fossils to argue for a more chaotic and contingent view of evolutionary history.
Traditional Tree of Life Model:
• Linear & Progressive: Evolution is often portrayed as a ladder or a neatly branching tree, with life progressing from simple to complex forms, culminating in humans at the top.
• Survival of the Fittest: This view emphasizes a gradual refinement of traits, with each branch representing a clear path of evolutionary success.
Burgess Shale & the Bushy Tree Model:
• Explosion of Diversity: The Burgess Shale fossils, dating to the Cambrian Explosion (~508 million years ago), reveal an extraordinary variety of bizarre, experimental life forms—many of which have no modern counterparts.
• High Extinction Rates: Most of these early life forms went extinct without leaving direct descendants. This suggests that survival was often a matter of chance rather than superiority.
• Contingency: Gould argued that if we could “rewind the tape of life” and let evolution play out again, the outcome would likely be very different. Evolution isn’t a predictable march toward complexity but a series of random experiments shaped by environmental shifts, mass extinctions, and luck.
Christmas Tree vs. Traditional Tree:
• Traditional Tree: Narrow trunk with neatly branching limbs, suggesting orderly, linear progression.
• Christmas Tree: Broad at the base, with dense, chaotic branches representing the explosion of early diversity. As you move upward (toward the present), the tree narrows, symbolizing the pruning effect of mass extinctions and selective pressures.
This view challenges the idea of humans—or any species—as the “inevitable” pinnacle of evolution. Instead, we are just one of many branches that happened to survive through a series of lucky breaks.
I believe the best way to think of this is that at some point in the distant past we had a common ancestor, but after that, the family branches diverged. So, I believe the answer is no.
Why wouldn’t the common ancestor be used in the chart? Is it because we haven’t discovered exactly what they were? But we know there was one due to the current descendants of that branch and the identification of where we are similar?
Okay, this makes sense. i just looked at the chart, and i read the article on it and a little more in depth, and it it explains it a little. Honestly, I would have been down to add them to my family tree.
LOL, I use military time all day long at work and at home, car clocks, cell phone clock, all set to military time. I used 12 hour clock here because most people I encounter are BAFFLED by the fact that there is a system that simply counts the 24 hours of the day…instead of counting to 12 twice. I thought 12 hour time here would be better for most people.
That wasn't even what Ice_Cube_June was confused about. They understood that 24 hours had nearly passed by the time humanity showed up and that it was nearly midnight when humanity showed up. What they misunderstood was...
that the point wasn't that earth ends after 24 hours, but that we are at the 24 hour mark right now, and...
that 12:00:00 minus 11:58:43 equals 00:01:17, not 00:11:17
Personally I'd extend it a bit of time back to homo erectus, who spanned 2million years and likely had fire and cooking. Cooking is what shrunk hominid's guts and teeth since food was much easier to chew and to digest, and also provided lot more nutrition per volume (breaking bonds in vegetable matter and meat) , and also resulted in less time devoted to eating and digesting. Altogether it is thought that cooking allowed the brains of hominids who cooked to get larger over time. Homo erectus may have had some overlap with more modern hominid lineages like neanderthals, denisovans, and homo sapiens too... there may have even been some back-breeding with homo erectus variants in some populations.
By comparison, neandethals existed for up to 430,000 years, and disappeared around 40,000 years ago, overlapping with modern humans and interbreeding with them. Modern humans, (if you don't count neanderthals and denisovans as modern) , existed for around 300,000 years. So we'd have to exist for another 130,000 years to match neanderthals span, and we'd have to exist for up to another 1.7 million years longer than we have so far to match homo erectus' successful span.
I'd also skip all the parts of the earth timeline that didn't have any life at all, but life started pretty early so it's still a very long time either way (and a short time since hominids hit the scene).
. . .
A lot of charts like those omit the fact that there were a lot of other hominid cousins. While you can plot a straight line to us, it was a branched tree of relatives who went extinct.
Imagine. Everyone of the creatures in the picture was our legitimate ancestor at some point. Reminds me of Bill Bryson quote.
“Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life's quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result -- eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly -- in you."
“For billions of years, since the outset of time, every single one of your ancestors survived, every single person on your mam and dad’s side, successfully looked after and passed onto new life. What are the chances of that like?” - The Streets
Meanwhile an Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel inventing modern science of genetics. Even Darwin himself was a deist believing in some form of creator. Denying of evolution is only common in some weird american evangelical churches.
So this is what they suggest we were when the dinosaurs were killed off. I thought it was further back in the group on the next tier up, more like a rodent. This guy was already one step away from a cheeky little monkey. I guess that extinction event really pushed us over the edge to level up
I mean this is just following one branch of the tree. But my question is about the end, because we aren't descendents of neanderthals (mixed breeding yeah, but that's only in some). It's like it followed a branch, and then combined branches at some points to make it look like a direct line.
If you are tracking the path of one species, this is actually how it would look, though; it is just one branch isolated. There is literally only one path for humans, or any species.
everyone of us has a straight ancestry that goes all the way to the top of the image! 4billion years of everything working out and yet i manage to be single since 29 years...
The last part on future humans.. with how convenient everything is becoming I wonder what happens to our bigger brains if we get used to not using them for anything complex anymore. That’s a sad thought. What got us to the point of the ultimate ease in getting questions answered.. complex computing, may be what ends up dumbing us down to a point we can’t survive.
As each of those massive steps came into play in evolution survival was an everyday struggle. Only the most clever species survived long enough to evolve. Now… it’s way different. It starts going backwards? Some evolutionary scientists have to have a theory on that one I need to google around a bit and see what the going one is on that for now. Hopefully no going backwards.
You know, no species on earth is more evolved than anything else. A human is as evolved as a turtle, or a mosquito. Every multicellular organism comes from LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor).
After 4 billion years of evolution, it’s sad we invented the idea of divine creator only in last 3000 years. This is I guess Homo sapiens crowning achievement.
as a person with a huge interest in palaeontology this image is quite misleading so imma have to correct some of this
* flatworms (phylum Platyhelminthes) are a separate lineage of protostome animals
* cephalaspis was part of a branch of jawless fish close to but not descended from the placodermi
* a lot of this i won’t even bother pointing out because most of them are separate lineages that diverged from human ancestry (eg. repenomammus, coelacanths)
I absolutely love how each time jump is smaller from the last, so the first time jump is like >300,000,000 years and the last time jump is only 160,000
it really shows the bias in our fossil record and labeling patterns
Now which one of those fucking assholes decided to crawl out of the water and start walking around on land cause I’m holding that fucker responsible for all bullshit we humans have to endure like paying bills and waging wars.
Or just watch Lindsay Nikole and her "History of Life on Earth... That we know of" series on YouTube. She does great work. Love her videos. True comfort YouTuber.
Oh gosh! I really dislike this kind of 'evolution in line' illustration neither the way the info was assembled. It's so misleading. I'm pretty sure no biologist was consulted.
Well this is super misleading. It’s a nice image but the vast majority of these entries are either an unconfirmed relation or a cousin that we are NOT descended from.
For example COELACANTH. Nobody has ever said they’re a direct relation. They are a fish that is a closer cousin than other fish.
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u/Sonar2099 Feb 01 '25
Looks like the Riddler will be the peak of evolution