Neil deGrasse Tyson Quotes

You don't just magically flip some evolutionary switch somewhere and transmute a quadruped into an upright-walking bipedal human.

Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.

Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.

How about Pithecanthropus Erectus? Was it really he who ate the apple? Or was it Homo Pekiniensis?

The right question to ask from a Darwinian prospective is what was it about bipedalism that was so advantageous? Why did it lead to a - why did that adaptation ultimately lead to a species Homo sapiens that has come to dominate the planet today with six and a half billion people?

We hope to find more pieces of the puzzle which will shed light on the connection between this upright, walking ape, our early ancestor, and modern man.

The difference between humans and Neanderthals is .004 percent of gene code. That's how big the difference is, one species to another.

When I realized, in 1978, that Lucy did represent a new species of human ancestor, and that I had an opportunity to name this new species, I realized this was a revolutionary step in understanding human origins.

I kept an open mind on the question of whether a hominid had been present in Europe in the early Pleistocene.

But what really excited me was the idea that humans had a tremendous pre-history that went back millions of years. I wanted to go to Africa to find some of these creatures.

What's changed is we now have good anatomical, geological, archaeological evidence that Neanderthals are not our ancestors. When I wrote 'Lucy,' I considered Neanderthals ancestors of modern humans. We have gone back twice the age of Lucy, six million years. And we see that upright bipedal walking goes back that far in time.

Lucy brought with her an image of our human ancestors that you don't get when you find a jaw or an arm bone or a leg bone. Here was 40 percent of a single skeleton.

Living in your genome is the history of our species.

Selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago. She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.

Are we the first hominids? I really, really, really doubt it.

We are all descendants of Adam, and we are all products of racial miscegenation.

I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.

But it really wasn't until three to four years later, when we had an opportunity in the lab to make very detailed observations, and comparisons with other fossil discoveries, that we realized she was a new species of human ancestor.

Until about 30,000 years ago, there were at least five other species of humans on the planet. Homo Sapiens, our ancestors, lived mainly in East Africa, and you had the Neanderthal in Europe, Homo Erectus in part of Asia, and so forth.

We are bipedal apes, and it should not be surprising to see that fact reflected in the way our ancestors lived.

From a genomic perspective, we are all Africans.

The creature called man has a strange history. He is not of one piece, nor was he born of a single moment in time. His elementary substance is stardust almost as old as the universe.

The origin of Homo sapiens, as a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree, lies well below the boundary.

Man developed in Africa. He has not continued to do so there.

Are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species? Or, are we destined to become something different - something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment?