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The timeline of human evolution outlines the major events in the evolutionary lineage of the modern human species, Homo sapiens, throughout the history of life, beginning some 4 billion years ago down to recent evolution within H. sapiens during and since the Last Glacial Period.
Human history is the record of humankind from prehistory to the present. Modern humans evolved in Africa around 300,000 years ago and initially lived as hunter-gatherers.They migrated out of Africa during the Last Ice Age and had spread across Earth's continental land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
The timeline of the evolutionary history of life represents the current scientific theory outlining the major events during the development of life on planet Earth. Dates in this article are consensus estimates based on scientific evidence , mainly fossils .
Although many effects upon life on Earth and human evolution from the increase in cosmic rays have been tentatively proposed, the effects are not considered to have been strong enough (further refuted by paleoecological evidence) to have significantly affected natural or human history. [37] 42 kya: Paleolithic flutes in Germany. [38]
For events dating from the formation of the planet to the rise of modern humans see: Timeline of natural history, Timeline of the evolutionary history of life and Timeline of human evolution. For events dating from the first appearance of Homo sapiens to before the invention of writing see: Timeline of prehistory
Called the Anthropocene — and derived from the Greek terms for “human” and “new” — this epoch started sometime between 1950 and 1954, according to the scientists.
Cave paintings (such as this one from France) represent a benchmark in the evolutionary history of human cognition. Victorian naturalist Charles Darwin was the first to propose the out-of-Africa hypothesis for the peopling of the world, [39] but the story of prehistoric human migration is now understood to be much more complex thanks to twenty-first-century advances in genomic sequencing.
[f] The English word human is from the Latin humanus, the adjectival form of homo. The Latin homo derives from the Indo-European root * dhghem, or 'earth'. [221] Linnaeus and other scientists of his time also considered the great apes to be the closest relatives of humans based on morphological and anatomical similarities. [222]