Which living animals are the closest relatives of human beings?
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Comparison of genomes puts the split between our line and theirs at somewhere around six to eight million years ago, more recently than the branch leading to any other living ape.
What does bipedalism mean?
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It shows in the skeleton rather than only in behaviour: the pelvis shortens and broadens, the thigh bones angle inwards and the foot gains an arch and a forward-facing big toe.
What is the scientific name of living humans?
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The genus name groups us with a number of extinct species, and the species name was given by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century.
Which species does the 1974 Ethiopian skeleton nicknamed Lucy belong to?
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Found at Hadar in the Afar region, it is about 3.2 million years old and preserves enough of the pelvis and leg to show upright walking alongside a still small braincase.
What does the word hominin refer to?
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It is the narrower of two similar terms: hominid now takes in all the great apes, while this one is kept for our own branch after it parted from the chimpanzee line.
Which extinct human relatives lived across Europe and western Asia until roughly 40,000 years ago?
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They were stocky, large-brained and skilled toolmakers, and they left hearths, shelters and worked stone across a range reaching from Wales to Siberia.
Whose 1871 book The Descent of Man argued that humans share ancestry with other apes?
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He had left the subject almost untouched in his earlier work, and by 1871 enough comparative anatomy had been published for him to argue the case directly.
Which of these continents did our own species reach last?
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Australia was settled tens of thousands of years earlier; the crossing into the far west came late, and the date of the very first arrival is still argued over.
Which science studies human origins through fossils and stone tools?
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It borrows from geology for dating, from anatomy for the fossils and from archaeology for the tools, which is why its findings are usually published by teams rather than individuals.
Which food-processing skill, in use for hundreds of thousands of years, made tough plants and meat far easier to eat?
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Heat breaks down tissue that teeth and gut would otherwise have to deal with, and the hearths at some early sites are among the clearest traces of the change.
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