Everything You Do Has A History. You Wake Up Each Morning And Get Out Of bed using an anatomy that allowed your ancestors to stand upright at least 4 million years ago. You go to the kitchen and eat cereal with a bowl and spoon that are part of a toolmaking tradition at least 2.5 million years old. As you munch your cereal, you page through the newspaper, which you can understand thanks to a brain capable of language, abstract thought, and prodigious memory―a brain that has been expanding for 2 million years. Until a few decades ago, most of that evolutionary history was hidden from science's view. But these days hardly a month goes by without news of a significant discovery. Paleoanthropologists keep digging up new fossils of our ancestors, and some of those fossils have even yielded DNA fragments. Meanwhile, geneticists have compiled a veritable encyclopedia of evolution―the se-quenced human genome―and within a few years they'll be able to compare it with the genome of one of our closest living relatives, the common chimpanzee. Still, what we don't know about our evolution vastly outweighs what we do know. Age-old questions defy a full accounting, and new discoveries introduce new questions. That's not unusual for any field of science, but the eight mysteries on the following pages are intimate ones, because understanding our origins is key to understanding ourselves.
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