Homo sapiens

Where Lived: Evolved in Africa, now worldwide

When Lived: About 200,000 years ago to present

The species that you and all other living human beings on this planet belong to is Homo sapiens.
During a time of dramatic climate change 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiensevolved in Africa. Like
other early humans that were living at this time, they gathered and hunted food, and evolved
behaviors that helped them respond to the challenges of survival in unstable environments.

Anatomically, modern humans can generally be characterized by the lighter build of their skeletons
compared to earlier humans. Modern humans have very large brains, which vary in size from
population to population and between males and females, but the average size is approximately
1300 cubic centimeters. Housing this big brain involved the reorganization of the skull into what is
thought of as "modern" -- a thin-walled, high vaulted skull with a flat and near vertical forehead.
Modern human faces also show much less (if any) of the heavy brow ridges and prognathism of
other early humans. Our jaws are also less heavily developed, with smaller teeth.

Scientists sometimes use the term “anatomically modern Homo sapiens” to refer to members of our
own species who lived during prehistoric times.

History of Discovery:
Unlike every other human species, Homo sapiens does not have a true type specimen. In other
words, there is not a particular Homo sapiens individual that researchers recognize as being the
specimen that gave Homo sapiens its name. Even though Linnaeus first described our species in
1758, it was not customary at that time to designate type specimens. It is rumored that in 1994
paleontologist Robert Bakker formally declared the skull of Edward Drinker Cope as the
“lectotype”, a specimen essentially serving as the type specimen. When Cope, himself a great
paleontologist, died in 1897, he willed his remains to science, and they are held by the University of
Pennsylvania. But a type specimen must be one examined by the original author who names a
species, so Cope’s remains do not qualify.

Species traits include:

 a globular cranial vault

 supraorbital ridges small or absent

 a chin on the lower jaw

Homo is the genus that comprises the species Homo sapiens, which includes modern humans, as well as
several extinct species classified as ancestral to or closely related to modern humans—as for examples
Homo habilis and Homo neanderthalensis. The genus is about 2.8 million years old;[1][2][3][4][5] it first
appeared as its earliest species Homo habilis, which emerged from the genus Australopithecus, which
itself had previously split from the lineage of Pan, the chimpanzees.[6][7] Taxonomically, Homo is the
only genus assigned to the subtribe Hominina which, with the subtribes Australopithecina and Panina,
comprise the tribe Hominini (see evolutionary tree below). All species of the genus Homo plus those
species of the australopithecines that arose after the split from Pan are called hominins.

The word "hominid" in this website refers to members of the family of humans, Hominidae, which
consists of all species on our side of the last common ancestor of humans and living apes. Hominids are
included in the superfamily of all apes, the Hominoidea, the members of which are called hominoids.
Although the hominid fossil record is far from complete, and the evidence is often fragmentary, there is
enough to give a good outline of the evolutionary history of humans.

The time of the split between humans and living apes used to be thought to have occurred 15 to 20
million years ago, or even up to 30 or 40 million years ago. Some apes occurring within that time period,
such as Ramapithecus, used to be considered as hominids, and possible ancestors of humans. Later
fossil finds indicated that Ramapithecus was more closely related to the orang-utan, and new
biochemical evidence indicated that the last common ancestor of hominids and apes occurred between
5 and 10 million years ago, and probably in the lower end of that range (Lewin 1987). Ramapithecus
therefore is no longer considered a hominid.

The field of science which studies the human fossil record is known as paleoanthropology. It is the
intersection of the disciplines of paleontology (the study of ancient lifeforms) and anthropology (the
study of humans).