Page 6 - Professorial Lecture - Prof Omoregie

INTRODUCTION

Ladies and Gentlemen, in a lecture of this nature, the best starting point is to take
the distinguished audience through the timeline of the evolution of the universe,
the origin of the marine environment, the beginning of life itself, the appearance
of human, and the beginning of exploitation of marine resources by humans.

According to Cosmologists, the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe
would have occurred approximately 13.75 billion years ago. The Science of
Evolution revealed that life on earth probably started about 4.6 billion years ago.
For a very considerable length of time (over 4 billion of the 4.6 billion), life was
restricted to the aquatic environment in microscopic form.

The very first form of life on land was just about 420 million years ago, it was not
until 65 million years ago that mammals became the most advanced form of life.

Appearance of
Homo sapiens
(modern man)
Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, it is only recently that upright-standing two-
legged primates appeared on evolutionary time-scale - just around 4 million years
ago, and homo sapiens (modern man) only came into the picture around 400,000
years ago. The first record of human’s agrarian civilization (gathering and
domestication of plants and animals) only started about 6,000 years ago.

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