Analysis: Are we more closely related to starfish or insects’

Professor Max Telford and Dr Paschalia Kapli (both UCL Biosciences) discuss the difficulties of tracing the vertebrate origins of humans, and say the long held view that vertebrates are closely related to echinoderms such as starfish may be misplaced. How humans evolved from the very first animals over the last 600 million years is an endlessly fascinating question. When piecing together the many steps leading from our first simple animal ancestor to modern Homo sapiens, the first thing we need to know is how we are related to other animal groups. Many aspects of our family tree are obvious. It is easy to see that we are members of the great apes, primates and mammals, for example. Going deeper in into our history, even Aristotle was aware that mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fishes are united by the shared feature of a backbone in a group we call the vertebrates. Our vertebrate origins lie deep in the history of animal life on Earth, and the earliest fossils with some form of a backbone date to over half a billion years ago.