The story of human evolution began in Africa about six million years ago

and it describes the very long process that our ancestors went through to
ultimately become modern humans. This process has been uncovered by
studying fossils and understanding the underlying theory of evolution, and
while new fossils are uncovered every decade revealing new chapters,
scientists agree about the basic story.

What Is Evolution?
Evolution means the changes that occur in a population over time. In this
denition, a population means a group of the same species that share a
specic location and habitat. Evolutionary changes always occur on the
genetic level. In other words, evolution is a process that results in
changes that are passed on or inherited from generation to generation. It
does not, for example, describe how people can change their muscle
mass by lifting weights.

When successful, these genetic changes or adaptations, which happen
when genes mutate and/or combine in di"erent ways during reproduction,
help organisms survive, reproduce, and raise o"spring. Some individuals
inherit characteristics that make them more successful at surviving and
having babies. These advantageous characteristics tend to appear more
frequently in the population (because those individuals with less
advantageous characteristics are more likely to die without reproducing),
and over time these changes become common throughout that
population, ultimately leading to new species.

The Tree of Life
Biological evolution explains the way all living things evolved over billions
of years from a single common ancestor. This concept is often illustrated
by the so-called tree of life. Every branch on the tree represents a
species. The fork separating one species from another represents the
common ancestor that each pair of species shared. So ultimately, all life is
interconnected, but any two species may be separated by millions or
even billions of years of evolution.

Only a Theory?
Some people dismiss evolution as just a theory. Evolution is in fact a
theory, a scientic theory. In everyday use, the word theory often means a
guess or a rough idea: My theory is I have a theory about that. But
among scientists, the word has an entirely di"erent meaning. In science, a
theory is an overarching explanation used to describe some aspect of the
natural world that is supported by overwhelming evidence.

Other scientic theories include cell theory, which says that all living
things are made up of cells, and heliocentric theory, which says the earth
revolves around the sun instead of the other way around.

The Relationship between Apes and Humans
Since scientists developed the ability to decode the genome and
compare the genetic makeup of species, some people have been stunned
to learn that about 98.5% of the genes in people and chimpanzees are
identical. This nding means chimps are the closest living biological
relatives to humans, but it does not mean that humans evolved from
chimps. What it does indicate is that humans share a common ancestor
with modern African apes (i.e., gorillas and chimpanzees), making us very,
very distant cousins. We are therefore related to these other living
primates, but we did not descend from them.

Modern humans di"er from apes in many signicant ways. Human brains
are larger and more complex; people have elaborate forms of
communication and culture; and people habitually walk upright, can
manipulate very small objects, and can speak.

Our Common Ancestor
Most scientists believe our common ancestor existed 5 to 8 million years
ago. Then two species broke o" into separate lineages, one ultimately
evolving into gorillas and chimps, the other evolving into early humans
called hominids. In the millions of years that followed, at least a dozen
di"erent species of humanlike creatures have existed, reected in the
fossil discoveries of paleoanthropologists, although many of these
species are close relatives but not actual ancestors of modern humans.

In fact, the fossil record does not represent a straight line of ancestry at
all; many of these early hominids left no descendents and simply died out.
Still others are most likely direct ancestors of modern humans or Homo
sapiens. While scientists still do not know the total number of hominid
species that existed, because new fossils are discovered every decade,
the story of human evolution becomes clearer all the time.

What about the Missing Link?
The idea of a missing link has persisted, but it is not actually a scientic
term. In the popular imagination, this missing link would be the fossil of
our common ancestor. While scientists agree on the concept of a
common ancestor, deciding which fossil represents that actual species is
challenging if not impossible, given that the fossil record will never be
100% complete. Also, the word implies that evolution is a straight chain
of events, when in fact the sequence of evolution is much more
complicated.

The Fossil Record
Fossils are the remains or impressions of living things hardened in rock.
All living organisms have not been preserved in the fossil record; in fact,
most have not because very specic conditions must exist in order to
create fossils. Even so, the fossil record provides a fairly good outline of
human evolutionary history.

The earliest humans were found in Africa, which is where much of human
evolution occurred. The fossils of these early hominids, which lived 2 to 6
million years ago, all come from that continent. Most scientists believe
early humans migrated out of Africa into Asia between 2 million and 1.7
million years ago, entering Europe some time within the past 1 million
years. What follows are some highlights of the early human species that
have been identied by scientists to date.



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