The earliest candidate for hominin status is Sahelanthropus tchadensis, based on a cranium from of Chad in north-central Africa. Announced in 2002, this specimen is dated to the period between 7 and 6 mya. The distinctive mark of Hominini, the lineage that includes humans and their direct ancestors, is generally taken to be upright land locomotion on two legs (terrestrial bipedalism). The skull of S. tchadensis does not indicate with certainty if this species was at all terrestrial, although the fairly forward position of its foramen magnum (the hole through which the spinal cord exits the braincase) may suggest a habitually upright posture. The most remarkable aspect of this skull is the broadness and flatness of its face—something previously associated with much more recent hominins—in conjunction with a smaller, ape-sized braincase. This specimen also has small canine teeth compared with those of apes, thus aligning it with the hominins in an important functional regard. No consensus has developed on exactly where this find fits into the human family tree (or, more appropriately, “family bush”), but, even if it is a hominin, it is highly unlikely to be a direct ancestor of H. sapiens.

Sahelanthropus, then, emphasizes an evolutionary pattern that seems to have been a characteristic of the tribe Hominini from the very start—a pattern that aligns it with what is observed in most other evolutionarily successful groups of mammals. Human evolution, it appears, has consistently been a process of trial and error. Historically, this process has been considered a more or less direct series of assumed improvements within a single lineage that eventually culminated in the burnished “perfection” of H. sapiens. As flattering to the modern human ego as this picture may be, it is evidently quite wrong. Instead, human evolution has been throughout its long history a matter of experimentation, with new species being constantly spawned and thrown into the ecological arena to compete and, more often than not, become extinct. Viewed this way, H. sapiens is simply the last surviving twig on a vast and intricately branching bush, rather than the sole occupant of a summit that has been laboriously climbed and, by extension, somehow earned.

Fossils found since the early 1990s have begun to hint at just how complex the hominin bush was in the three million years or so following the time of Sahelanthropus. Three other new genera of early hominins (Ardipithecus, Orrorin, and Kenyanthropus) dating from 6 to 3 mya have been recovered from Kenya and Ethiopia. Furthermore, during the latter half of the 20th century, new species were added to the long-established genera Australopithecus and Paranthropus, both known from South and East African sites. This early radiation (diversification) of hominins, of which the latest survivors lived as recently as about 1.5 mya, made for a rather motley assortment. In general, they were relatively small-bodied, with large chewing teeth but reduced (sometimes highly reduced) canine teeth. They had small (ape-sized) braincases and rather protruding faces. Given these apelike cranial proportions, it is hardly surprising that many paleoanthropologists have characterized these early hominins as “bipedal apes.” Though they were indeed bipedal, there are subtle but important structural features in their anatomy that show they walked differently from the way modern humans do.

Two of the best examples of such a creature include “Ardi,” a hominin of the species Ardipithecus ramidus from Aramis, Ethiopia, and the famous “Lucy,” a hominin of the species Australopithecus afarensis from Hadar, Ethiopia. Ardi’s skeleton, which is more than 50 percent complete, dates to about 4.4 mya. The design of her pelvis and feet are suggestive of bipedal locomotion. However, other skeletal elements indicate that she spent much of her time clambering through the branches of trees. In contrast, Lucy’s skeleton is 40 percent complete and dates to about 3.2 mya. Lucy’s pelvis is more humanlike, and the design of her knee joint suggests that she walked upright in a manner similar to that of modern humans. These fossils, along with the slightly older trails of footprints found at Laetoli, Tanzania, prove that early hominins were upright bipeds when on the ground. However, they also retained many reminders of their tree-dwelling ancestry, especially their rather long arms, short legs, narrow shoulders, and long grasping extremities. All these features would have made them agile upright foragers among tree branches, where they presumably sought food by day and sheltered at night even though they moved on two legs while on the ground. The environments in which these early hominins lived suggest that (1) they were still comfortable in the forest and (2) they were largely active at the forest edges and in the woodlands where the forest graded into more open savanna—a type of habitat that was expanding in their African homeland after about 7 mya as climates became drier and more seasonal.

The genus Homo

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It is difficult to say how the wide variety of early hominins were interrelated. Moreover, although these ancient forms were clearly members of the same larger group, discerning exactly how any of them may have been connected to later species is problematic because of incomplete fossil evidence or different interpretations of the same evidence. Homo may have originated as early as about 2.8 mya, though the record during this time is tantalizingly fragmentary. A variety of incomplete or broken fossils from the period between about 2.5 and 2.0 mya have been placed in the category of “early Homo,” while slightly later fossils from Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge and elsewhere have been called H. habilis. Taken together, this hominin assemblage makes a rather odd assortment that is based more than anything else on a modest increase in the size of the brain compared with that of Australopithecus and its relatives. Even more important in the assignment of these fossils to Homo may be the occurrence in the same geologic deposits of very primitive stone tools. The notion of “man the toolmaker” was very powerful in the early 1960s when H. habilis was named.

Decades later, the species responsible for producing the first stone tools remains unknown, but it likely was relatively small-brained, with a body proportioned quite differently from that of H. sapiens. Found near Kenya’s Lake Turkana in a layer of rock dating to approximately 3.3 mya, during the middle of the Pliocene Epoch (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago), the first tools—primitive hammers, anvils, and cutting tools—predate the emergence of Homo by almost 400,000 years. Paleontologists speculate that, barring the finding of an as-yet-undiscovered species of Homo, the tools were likely constructed by members of Australopithecus or Kenyanthropus.

Cranial remains dating to slightly less than 2 mya have been discovered at Koobi Fora, Kenya. These are thought to belong to the same species as the remarkably complete 1.6-million-year-old skeleton named “Turkana Boy,” found at nearby Nariokotome. The nature of the association between the two finds is not yet completely evident, as even partial hominin skeletons are almost vanishingly rare as researchers delve deeper into the past to a time before the introduction of burial practices. Discovered in 1984, the slender-limbed, long-legged Nariokotome skeleton is the first solid evidence of an individual that resembled H. sapiens in overall bodily form. Here at last is a representative of a species that was definitely at home on the open savanna, emancipated from the forest and woodland environments to which its predecessors had been confined. Turkana Boy was 1.6 metres (5 feet 3 inches tall) when he died at age eight, and it is estimated that he would have topped 1.8 metres (6 feet) at maturity. His skeleton bears the basic hallmarks of H. sapiens. His face, however, was quite projecting, and his brain was little more than half the size of that of H. sapiens. Cranial traits notwithstanding, this individual clearly deserves to be classified with H. sapiens in the genus Homo. However, he is often assigned by authorities to either H. ergaster or H. erectus, the latter of which was originally based on specimens from Java discovered in the 1890s; others include him in an extended interpretation of H. sapiens.

Once modern human body proportions had been achieved, such species could indulge their newfound wanderlust. By about 1.8 mya hominins, previously confined to Africa, had roamed as far afield as China and Indonesia. In their new territories they diversified, as might be expected, with new species emerging in different regions. H. erectus appeared in the outskirts of Europe (at the Dmanisi site in present-day Georgia) as well as in eastern Asia early on; the next earliest European hominin, H. antecessor, is known only from considerably later, about 800 kya. Africa appears to have been the source of not just one but successive waves of hominin emigrants, including H. heidelbergensis, which had originated by 600 kya and found its way to Europe by 500 kya. In Europe an early representative of H. heidelbergensis may have given rise to the groups that included the Neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis), who populated Europe and western Asia from about 200 to 30 kya. Africa, however, apparently continued to produce species that figure more directly in the ancestry of today’s H. sapiens.

Throughout there was a tendency for new hominin species to acquire ever larger brains. H. heidelbergensis, for example, had a brain about two-thirds the size of H. sapiens, while those of the Neanderthals were in some cases larger than the H. sapiens average. This increase must have come at a cost, because brain tissue expends significant amounts of energy. There must have been benefits of a larger brain, but what those benefits were can only be guessed; quantifying human intelligence is problematic even among living humans, let alone extinct ones.

H. sapiens is thought to have evolved in Africa. The oldest known remains thought to be H. sapiens, found at Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, were unearthed in the first decade of the 2000s. This collection of specimens was made up of skull fragments, a complete jawbone, and stone tools, all of which date to about 315 kya, which may suggest that the species was widely dispersed throughout Africa by that time. The second oldest remains date to approximately 200 kya in East Africa. This estimate is shaped by the discovery in 1967 of the oldest remains attributed to H. sapiens, in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley. The remains, made up of two skulls (Omo 1 and Omo 2), were initially dated to 130 kya. In 2022, however, the results of an argon-dating analysis, which estimated the age of a layer of tuff that overlay Omo 1, suggested that the Omo 1 remains date to at least 233 kya. H. sapiens spread later to all continents, arriving in southern China between 120 kya and 80 kya, reaching Australia between 65 kya and 50 kya, and entering Europe about 45–43 kya. Most evidence points to H. sapiens migrating to the Americas about 14–13.3 kya; however, some evidence suggests that this migration may have taken place up to 15,000 years earlier. H. sapiens have maintained a presence in Antarctica only since the 19th century.