Image
courtesy of The Natural History Museum via Alamy
Joel Kontinen
According
to evolution, the first human species saw daylight roughly 300,000 years ago.
Modern humans emerged roughly, but our genus
Homo is much older. So what's the oldest human species on record?
“All humans
today are members of the modern human species Homo sapiens — Latin
for "knowing man." But we're far from the only humans who ever
existed. Fossils are revealing more and more about early humans in the
genus Homo — ancestors like Homo erectus (Latin for
"upright man"), who lived in Africa, Asia, the parts of Europe
between 1.9 million and 110,000 years ago.
Various
species of Australopithecus lived from about 4.4 million to 1.4
million years ago. It may be that H. habilis evolved directly from
the species Australopithecus afarensis — the best-known example of
which is "Lucy," who was unearthed at Hadar in Ethiopia in
1974.
The fossils
of our genus are usually distinguished from Australopithecus fossils by Homo's distinctively
smaller teeth and a relatively large brain, which led to the greater use of
stone tools.
But White
noted that traits like smaller teeth and bigger brains must have emerged at
times in the Australopithecus populations that early Homo evolved
from."
Source:
Tom Metcalfe 2025 What was the first human species? | Live Science August 16
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