What year did Darwin make his discovery?

Perhaps the earliest documentation of evolution can be traced to Xenophanes (b. 570 BC). He recognized that the rock in which the fossils were found had at one time been submerged mud. He explained theexistence of fossils by saying that the world evolved from a mixture of earth and water. It was long recognized that older layers of fossile-bearing rock contained different, more primitive forms of life than later layers, but no scientific consensus explaining how this happened was found until Origin Of Species was published by Charles Darwin (b. 1809) in 1859. Darwin proposed the mechanism of survival of the fittest, but had no knowledge of genetics. Biologist and monk Johann Gregor Mendel (b. 1822), whose work was ignored during his life, proposed a mechanism for heredity by hypothesizing that traits, such as eye color or height or flower hues, were carried by tiny particles that were inherited whole in the next generation. DNA was first isolated by the Swiss physician Friedrich Miescher (b. 1844) in 1869, and in 1953 James D. Watson (b. 1928) and Francis Crick (b. 1916) suggested what is now accepted as the first correct double-helix model of DNA.