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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.
The evidence on which scientific accounts of human evolution are based comes from many fields of natural science. The main source of knowledge about the evolutionary process has traditionally been the fossil record, but since the development of genetics beginning in the 1970s, DNA analysis has come to occupy a place of comparable importance.
Anatomically modern humans appear in Africa. [103] [104] [105] Around 50 ka they start colonising the other continents, replacing Neanderthals in Europe and other hominins in Asia. 70 ka Genetic bottleneck in humans (Toba catastrophe theory). 40 ka Last giant monitor lizards (Varanus priscus) die out. 35-25 ka Extinction of Neanderthals.
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.
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 continential land except Antarctica by the end of the Ice Age 12,000 years ago.
And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other, yet to be discovered." [33] Similarly, biologist Richard Lenski says, "Scientific understanding requires both facts and theories that can explain those facts in a coherent manner. Evolution, in this context, is both a fact and a theory.
The only human fossils found before the discovery of Java Man in the 1890s were either of anatomically modern humans or of Neanderthals that were too close, especially in the critical characteristic of cranial capacity, to modern humans for them to be convincing intermediates between humans and other primates. [108]
Darwin's scientific method was also disputed, with his proponents favouring the empiricism of John Stuart Mill's A System of Logic, while opponents held to the idealist school of William Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, in which investigation could begin with the intuitive idea that species were fixed objects created by design. [217]