How did humans begin to classify and name all of life on Earth?

In a broad sense, taxonomy is the science of classification of living things including organisms that have long since gone extinct. Our need to classify species and bring order to the living world has been a driving desire for thousands of years, but the roots of classification and taxonomy begin with Aristotle. Some of Aristotle's writing contains the first examples of classification and separating animals based on their physical traits. Aristotle’s ideas about the classification of living things heavily influenced future scientists and documentarians of nature, …