Of all the human species that have ever lived, only one, Homo sapiens, conquered the entire planet. The apelike australopithecines (Lucy and her ilk) never ventured out of Africa. The Neandertals never ventured in.
Scientists are sure that Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa, and we know that every person alive today can trace their genetic ancestry to there. It has long been thought that we began in one single east or south African population, which eventually spread into Asia and Europe.
Homo sapiens evolved in Africa before expanding to spread around the globe. Genetic data indicate that the ancestors of current human populations outside Africa did not leave that continent until about 60,000 years ago.
The extinct ancient human Homo erectus is a species of firsts. It was the first of our relatives to have human-like body proportions, with shorter arms and longer legs relative to its torso. It was also the first known hominin to migrate out of Africa, and possibly the first to cook food.
The three groups of hominins (human-like creatures) belonged to Australopithecus (the group made famous by the "Lucy" fossil from Ethiopia), Paranthropus and Homo - better known as humans.
The ancestors of humans and Neanderthals lived about 600,000 years ago in Africa. The Neanderthal lineage left the continent; the fossils of what we describe as Neanderthals range from 200,000 years to 40,000 years in age, and are found in Europe, the Near East and Siberia.
Some surmise that competition from humans for food and shelter, or evolution that selected for more successful human traits, contributed to the Neanderthals' extinction. Others think that because Neanderthals lived in such small groups, they simply became outnumbered by humans.
Two million years ago, three different early humans—Australopithecus, Paranthropus, and the earliest-known Homo erectus—appear to have lived at the same time in the same place, near the Drimolen Paleocave System.
In the past, some species were far more like us than other apes – Australopithecus, Homo erectus and Neanderthals. Homo sapiens are the only survivors of a once diverse group of humans and human-like apes, collectively known as the hominins.
Ardipithecus is the earliest known genus of the human lineage and the likely ancestor of Australopithecus, a group closely related to and often considered ancestral to modern human beings. Ardipithecus lived between 5.8 million and 4.4 million years ago.
A Sydney-led study has found that the earliest ancestors of anatomically modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) emerged in a southern African 'homeland' and thrived there for 70 thousand years.
A new genomic study has revealed that Aboriginal Australians are the oldest known civilization on Earth, with ancestries stretching back roughly 75,000 years.
Co-lead researcher Shimona Kealy said these people probably travelled through Indonesia's northern islands, into New Guinea and then Australia, which were part of a single continent between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, when sea levels were 25-50 metres below the current level.
Nine human species walked the Earth 300,000 years ago. Now there is just one. The Neanderthals, Homo neanderthalensis, were stocky hunters adapted to Europe's cold steppes. The related Denisovans inhabited Asia, while the more primitive Homo erectus lived in Indonesia, and Homo rhodesiensis in central Africa.
Homo sapiens is currently the only member of the genus Homo alive. There's only one species of human—but it wasn't always so.
The real Garden Of Eden has been traced to the African nation of Botswana, according to a major study of DNA. Scientists believe our ancestral homeland is south of the Zambezi River in the country's north.
By the time Homo sapiens arrived on the scene some 300,000 years ago, we were the ninth Homo species, joining habilis, erectus, rudolfensis, heidelbergensis, floresiensis, neanderthalensis, naledi, and luzonensis.
Some human populations alive in Europe and Asia today have as much as 3% Neanderthal DNA. At the time of the Neanderthals, there were several human species and suddenly 40 000 years ago, all disappeared but one.
neanderthalensis, the last human species to go extinct.
The chimpanzee and bonobo are humans' closest living relatives. These three species look alike in many ways, both in body and behavior.
Neanderthals might have typically lived shorter lives than modern humans, but their relative isolation will have protected them from the infectious diseases that sometimes wiped out whole populations of Homo sapiens.
The Neanderthal hyoid bone
Its similarity to those of modern humans was seen as evidence by some scientists that Neanderthals possessed a modern vocal tract and were therefore capable of fully modern speech.
East Asians seem to have the most Neanderthal DNA in their genomes, followed by those of European ancestry. Africans, long thought to have no Neanderthal DNA, were recently found to have genes from the hominins comprising around 0.3 percent of their genome.
We also think Homo sapiens had a competitive edge over Neanderthals. There is evidence that early Homo sapiens had long-distance trade networks, possibly buffering them against times of climate change when their preferred foods were not available; Neanderthals did not.