A trajetória humana

Abstract

The current knowledge of human evolution still present many polemic points, such as the origins of Hominina e, of the genus Homo and of the modern humans. However, information available today allow us to have a general picture of the patterns and processes in human evolution, in the light of current state-of-art of macro and microevolutionary theory, revised in this paper. A critical evaluation of patterns in human evolution reveals that a continuous and gradual evolutionary model is not support. Instead, there seems to exist a complex pattern of coexistence among various species, living in alternate periods of rapid evolutionary changes and extinctions, and asynchrony for evolutionary rates in different traits, caused by both adaptive and random (contingency) processes.