Did space rocks set the human stage?
No one argues that asteroids can be devastating when they tangle with Earth. An impact 65 million years ago is widely believed to have spurred the demise of the dinosaurs and many other animals and plants. Charting Our Uncertain Past Click to Enlarge Time Line Related SPACE.com Stories Cosmic Impact Encourages Life to Go Forth and Multiply Mass Extinction & Rise of Dinosaurs Tied to Cosmic Collision Life-Like Cell Walls Created in Deep-Space Lab Conditions Catastrophe, Mother of Evolution: Life Survived Early Bombardment Web Resources Human evolution overview Human evolution news How do you think humans evolved? Uplink Your Views! But efforts to tie other, more ancient mass extinctions to impacts remain inconclusive. While extinctions are clearly identifiable in fossil records, impact evidence seems not to survive the millennia as well. So impact estimates are based largely on the Moon — a nearby archive of countless craters that have not eroded much over time. Still, because scientis
