Human Family Tree The Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program
Table of Content File history Early Humans May Have First Walked Upright in the Trees Ancient DNA from Medieval Germany Tells the Origin Story of Ashkenazi Jews Homo The Challenge of Defining the Genus Homo The intermingling of the various populations eventually led to the single Homo sapiens species we see today. The most recent discovery, announced in June, would be a skull found near China’s Dragon River that goes back to greater than 140,000 years back. The huge fossilized cranium provides tantalizing clues into what humans appeared as if in those days, a period of time in East Asia by which there’s been a niche within the human fossil record. Humanity’s strange new cousin is shockingly young. Homo naledi lived as recently as 236,000 years ago and could have crossed paths with the direct ancestors of modern humans, scientists say. The site where the jaw was found, called Ledi-Geraru, was a mix of grasslands and a few shrubs 2.8 million years ago, similar to the Serengeti today, a...