The Origin of Humans Is Surprisingly Complicated
Many kinds of archaic humans walked the planet at the same time. How did Homo sapiens come to be the last species standing?
HUMAN FAMILY TREE used to be a scraggly thing. With relatively few
fossils to work from, scientists' best guess was that they could all be
assigned to just two lineages, one of which went extinct and the other
of which ultimately gave rise to us. Discoveries made over the past few
decades have revealed a far more luxuriant tree, however—one abounding
with branches and twigs that eventually petered out. This newfound
diversity paints a much more interesting picture of our origins but
makes sorting our ancestors from the evolutionary dead ends all the more
challenging, as paleoanthropologist Bernard Wood explains in the pages
that follow.
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