Common descent

In evolutionary biology, a group of organisms have common descent if they have a common ancestor. All living organisms on Earth are descended from a common ancestor or ancestral gene pool.

Charles Darwin proposed his theory of universal common descent through an evolutionary process in his On the Origin of Species (1859), and later in The Descent of Man (1871). This theory is now widely accepted by biologists. The last universal ancestor (LUA) (or last universal common ancestor, LUCA), that is, the most recent common ancestor of all currently living organisms, is believed to have appeared about 3.9 billion years ago.

License

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Common descent".