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Darwin's The Origin of Species suggested that humans were descended from African apes. However, no fossils of our ancestors were discovered in Africa until 1924, when Raymond Dart dug up the "Taung child" - a 3-million to 4 million-year-old Australopithecine.
Over the last century, many spectacular discoveries have shed light on the history of the human family. Somewhere between 12 and 19 different species of early humans are recognised, though palaeoanthropologists bitterly dispute how they are related. Famous fossils include the remarkably complete "Lucy", dug up in Ethiopia in 1974, and the astonishing "hobbit" species, Homo floresiensis, found on an Indonesian island in 2004.
Walking tall
Humans are really just a peculiar African ape - we share about 98% of our DNA with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives. Genetics and fossil evidence hint that we last shared a common ancestor 7 to 10 million years ago - even if we continued hybridising long after.
At around 6 million years ago, the first apes to walk on two legs appear in the fossil records. Despite the fact that many of these Australopithecines and other early humans were no bigger than chimps and had similar-sized brains, the shift to bipedalism was highly significant. Aside from our large brain, bipedalism is perhaps the most important difference between humans and apes, as it freed our hands to use tools.
Bipedalism may have evolved when drier conditions shrank dense African forests. It must have allowed our ancestors to spot predators from further away, reach hanging fruit from the ground, and reduce exposure to sunlight. Evidence that Australopithecines walked upright includes analysis of the shape of their bones and fossilised footprints.
One famous member of the species Australopithecus afarensis is the remarkably complete fossil found by palaeaoanthropologist Donald Johanson in Hadar, Ethiopia in 1974. The 3.2-million-year-old fossil was named Lucy, after the Beatles' song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
She stood around 1.1 metres (3.5 feet) tall and although she walked on two legs, she probably had a less graceful gait than us, since she walked with them bent.
Scientist's have modelled her gait using computers. Their characteristic long arms and curved fingers suggest that at least some Australopithecines were still good climbers.
Hundreds of other fossils of Australopithecus afarensis have now also been discovered. Other related early human species include Australopithecus africanus - such as the Taung child - 3.5-million-year-old Kenyanthropus platyops, 5.8-million to 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus, 5.8-million-year-old Orrorin tugenensis and 6 million year old Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
Tooled up
Australopithecines are thought to be the ancestors of Homo, the group to which our own species, Homo sapiens, belongs.
However, Australopithecines may also have given rise to another branch of hominid evolution - the vegetarian Paranthropus species. Around 2.7 million years ago, species such as Paranthropus bosei in east Africa evolved to take advantage of the dry grasslands. This included the development of enormous jaws and chewing muscles for grinding up tough roots and tubers.
By 2.4 million years ago, Homo habilis had appeared - the first recognisably human-like hominid to appear in the fossil record - which lived alongside P. bosei. Their bodies were around two-thirds the size of ours, but their brains were significantly larger than Australopithecines with a volume of about 600 cubic centimetres.
H. habilis had much smaller teeth and jaws than Paranthropus and was probably the first human to eat large quantities of meat. This meaty diet, acquired through scavenging, may have provided energy required to kick-start an increasing brain size. A mutation that weakened jaw muscles and gave our brains more space to grow may also lie behind the big brains we have today.
H. habilis - which means "handy man" - was also the first early human to habitually create tools and use them to break bones and extract marrow. This tool-making tradition, known as Oldowan, lasted virtually unchanged for a million years. Oldowan tools were made by breaking an angular rock with a "hammerstone" to give simple, sharp-edged stone flakes for chopping and slicing.
Despite their own increases in brain size, the Paranthropus group of species had become extinct by 1.2 million years ago. Some experts speculate that it was learning to work as a team against predators that gave Homo the edge.







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