Everything we know about human evolution and origins, a summary of recent finds

via Business Insider, 05 January 2020: A great summary article about recent discoveries in human origins and evolution that changed our conventional understanding of how humans came to populate the world. There is a mention of the Homo Luzonensis find that was first described last year.

In recent years, anthropologists around the world have discovered new human ancestors, figured out what happened to the Neanderthals, and pushed back the age of the earliest member of our species.

Taken together, these breakthroughs suggest that many of our previous ideas about the human origin story — who we are and where we came from — were wrong.

Until the past few years, most scientists thought the first members of our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in East Africa approximately 200,000 years ago. Then humanity remained in Africa for the next 140,000 years, according to this line of thought, before venturing into Europe and Asia in what’s known as the “Out of Africa” migration about 60,000 years ago. Those early humans proceeded to take over territories once occupied by other human ancestor species like Neanderthals.

But this understanding of history has been upended as new discoveries revealed that the first humans emerged much earlier than we thought and in a different part of Africa. Rather than simply replacing other competitor species, Homo sapiens seem to have interbred with them.

As researchers make more of these breakthroughs, the human evolutionary puzzle gets more complicated.

Source: Recent discoveries fundamentally change our picture of human evolution – Business Insider