Before us

The dinosaurs, apart from the birds, had been gone for about 60 million years when our story starts. Somewhere in Africa, between 6 and 7 million years ago, a group of apes split into two lines. One led to chimpanzees and bonobos. The other led to us. Scientists call the members of our side of the split hominins.

It is tempting to picture a single line marching from ape to human. The fossils tell a different story: a bushy family tree, with many branches alive at once, most of them dead ends.

Standing up came first

The oldest hominins, such as Sahelanthropus from Chad, are known only from a few bones and teeth. What marks them out is a change in the skeleton that suggests walking on two legs. By about 3.85 million years ago, Australopithecus afarensis was walking upright across eastern Africa. It had a brain not much bigger than a chimpanzee's. This species survived for more than 900,000 years, about three times as long as our own species has been around so far.

Stone tools and butchered bones appear about 2.6 million years ago. Nobody knows for certain who made the first ones, because several kinds of hominin lived in the same places at the same time.

Out of Africa

Homo erectus appears about 1.9 million years ago, with long legs and a body much like ours. It was the first hominin known to have spread far beyond Africa, as far as Georgia, China and Indonesia, and it lasted until about 110,000 years ago. Later came Homo heidelbergensis, and from it, in Europe and western Asia, the Neanderthals. They buried their dead, made fine stone tools and lived through ice ages, and they disappeared about 40,000 years ago.

Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago, at a time of big swings in climate. The oldest fossils so far come from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco. From Africa, modern humans spread across the whole world, meeting the Neanderthals and others on the way, and many people alive today carry a little Neanderthal DNA.

People in Britain

Britain has some of the oldest traces of people in northern Europe. In May 2013, storms stripped the sand from the beach at Happisburgh in Norfolk and exposed a surface of old estuary mud pressed with footprints, probably left by a small group that included children. They are between about 1 million and 780,000 years old, the oldest human footprints known outside Africa. Within weeks the sea had washed them away, but not before they were recorded in 3D.

At Boxgrove in West Sussex, a shin bone and teeth about half a million years old, possibly Homo heidelbergensis, are the oldest human remains found in Britain. And from Gough's Cave in Cheddar Gorge comes Cheddar Man, who lived about 10,000 years ago. He is the oldest almost complete skeleton of our own species found in Britain. DNA from his bones shows he probably had dark skin and blue eyes.

The human story carries on in our sister site, Our Centuries: the long human story, and all of human time, at true scale.