endev42 - documenting the meaning of life

Date of Birth: June 30, 1926

For me, the wonder of life as we define it, is the outcome of natural processes, the nature of which, in time, will be knowable!

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The true wonder of the diversity of life is how it evolved to the forms we share the earth with today.

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The best estimate of when life on Earth began is a half to a billion years after the earth was formed (4.3 billion years ago). Biological evolution from simple cellular forms led to the complex diversity of plant and animal organisms that exist today. During the ensuing millennia, many species in the plant and animal worlds emerged (on land, sea and air) and then vanished to be replaced by quite different forms. During the last half to one billion years ago, the earliest human forms arose in southern Africa and they migrated throughout and settled different areas of the earth. During that time these early human forms evolved into somewhat similar but distinctly different human species. Plants too were continually evolving new forms only several of which exist today. Ultimately, all of these early human species were replaced by a second wave of modem humans that emerged in Africa about one hundred thousand years ago. During the last ten to twenty thousand years, modem humans developed agricultural and animal husbandry that characterizes the organized cultural societies we recognize as civilization.