Genealogical Tree of Humanity

In the nineteenth century, some may have found the grim news of evolution to be tempered just a bit of artwork, showing humans triumphant atop the tree of life. One such illustration was produced in 1874 by the German Zoologist Ernst Haeckel, and featured in his book “anthropogenie.’ While Haeckel’s drawing didn’t show humans at the result of a straight line climb up the ladder of life, it certainly did conform our position at the very summit of the world of life. But Haeckel, of course, knew nothing of the wealth of p0rehuman fossils that would be found in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. As a result, he placed humans (“Menschen”) ina position of success and dominance supported by the highest branches of evolutionary diversification, much as Linnaeus had attempted to earlier.

While many people would still be content to imagine the tree of life in terms defined by Haeckel, the drawings we would make today are quite different. To a biologist, considering certain species as “higher” and certain others as “lower” is thought to be a mistake, since all living species are truly part of the same evolutionary process. That bacterium on the tip of your pencil is just as “evolved” as you are. It’s found a quite different way to make a living of course, but that’s no reason to place it at the bottom of the tree of life, emphasizing the evolutionary relationships among organisms, would look something this: