During this weeks lectures, we have learned all about the ancient relatives of Homosapiens and how we have evolved. Throughout human evolution, our family tree continued to be separated into many different groups by era. The main ones we learned about during this weeks lectures were the Ardipithecus group, which is the group from about five million years ago, the Australopithecus group, which is from three million years ago, the Paranthropus group, which is from about two million years ago and lastly, the Homo group which is what we are currently a part of. These lectures covered a great amount of phenotypic traits that have constantly been evolving in hominins due to our surroundings and activities we participate in, which we can connect to our physical traits today. 

Although there are very many different human traits that have evolved throughout our time, two that are very important are our canine teeth and our grasping big toe. We began with very large canine teeth that helped us to defend ourselves and used to fight with. As we have evolved to smaller canine teeth, we no longer use our mouth as a defense mechanism and have learned to use things like our arms and legs. Another flaw with larger teeth was that they were not linked to meat-eaters which is more necessary as most humans are now eating meat and can use their small canine teeth as incisors.Next, Chimpanzees needed their large grasping big toe to help them hang from trees and swing from branches to get themselves around. As humans, we do not do these activities so we no longer needed the support the grasping big toe was giving us. It is clear that becoming bipedal has had a large impact on human evolution because we are able to reach fruit and other objects, run, go longer distances, etc., however, in the second reading, birth has become more difficult and fatal, it is causing severe back problems, and so on. Due to this, understanding how hominids became bipedal help us explain not only these problems, but also why we become bipedal and why species like chimpanzees and gorillas, have remained as such.

Being able to reconstruct human ancestors and their environments has proved incredibly useful for anthropology and the understanding of our past. Fossilized skeletal remains of early human ancestors are used to help anthropologists reconstruct pieces and learn from the past. This is done so by using various methods like radioactive decay to determine the general time frame when those species existed. Once they were able to compare eras, they were able to see how much a species has evolved throughout that time. By comparing from different time eras, they can collect data on the evolution and use that to help predict how our evolution will continue as time goes on. We know the world will continue to evolve, especially due to things like global warming, so humans will also have to continue to adapt and evolve in order to keep surviving. If certain characteristics were gone from the next branching species or a specific species relatively quickly went extinct, we can learn from that to better understand those hominids and ourselves.