Human Evolution: A Brief Overview

Very little is firmly known about the earliest hominins, and their evolutionary relationships remain disputed. The one feature they all share, by definition, is bipedalism. The hominins were basically bipedal great apes. One well-documented species (famously known under the moniker Lucy) is Australopithecus afarensis. With Homo erectus, appearing in eastern Africa around 1.9 Mya, we have the first modern-looking hominin, widely regarded as the first undisputed representative of the genus Homo. Our early ancestors probably initially had an innate fear of fire, like other mammals. Thus, phase 1 toward the use of fire involved the loss of fear and the presence of enough inhibitory control to study the behavior of fires. Modern people (Homo sapiens) moved out of Africa again. This process is called Out-of-Africa-II, to differentiate it from the first such exodus, which involved Homo erectus.