Human evolution

Human evolution is the evolutionary history of humans and their ancestors, shaped by changes in anatomy, behavior, genetics, and population relationships over millions of years.

Natural selection: The process by which heritable traits that improve reproductive success become more common in a population. It favored traits suited to changing climates, diets, pathogens, and ways of life.
Hominini: The primate tribe containing humans and the extinct species more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees. Human evolution is one branch of this broader lineage.
Hominin: A member of the evolutionary lineage more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees. This lineage is the basic unit used to describe human ancestry.
Lucy (Australopithecus): A partial Australopithecus afarensis skeleton discovered in Ethiopia in 1974. Her skeleton provided unusually clear evidence of early hominin bipedal anatomy.
Origin of Homo sapiens: The evolutionary emergence of the living human species from earlier African populations. Researchers debate how geographically structured populations contributed to the species' emergence.
Genetic drift: Random changes in allele frequencies caused by chance events in finite populations. Small ancestral populations made chance losses and gains of genetic variants consequential.
Australopithecus afarensis: An East African hominin species that lived about 3.9 to 2.9 million years ago and walked upright. Its fossils document early bipedalism long before the appearance of Homo sapiens.
Bipedalism: Locomotion using two legs as the primary means of movement. Upright walking is an early defining adaptation in the human lineage.
Out of Africa theory: The model that modern humans originated in Africa and later dispersed across the world. Genetic and fossil evidence supports an African origin for Homo sapiens, followed by expansion.
Middle Stone Age: An African archaeological period marked by diverse stone technologies, spanning much of the Middle Pleistocene and later. Its artifacts help assess when behaviors associated with modern humans appeared.

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