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Lived 400,000-40,000 years ago
Height: 5'1" - 5'5"
Weight: 119-144 lbs

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Lived  3.5 to 2.89 million years ago
Height: 3'5"- 4'11"
Weight: 64-92 lbs
looked very ape-like

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Lived 200,000 years to present
Height: 5'6" - 5'10"
Weight: 135-200 lbs
we are homo sapiens

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Lived about 2.1 to 1.5 million years ago
Looked very monkey-like
were 3-4 ft tall
weighed 70 lbs

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lived from 1.89 million  to 143,000 years ago.
were 4'9" to 6'1"
weighed 88-150 lbs

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https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/human-evolution-101/

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/human-evolution.html
https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/09/human-evolution-101/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-did-the-human-mind-evolve-to-what-it-is-today-140507905/
http://humanorigins.si.edu/

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http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/human-evolution.html

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Wanting to understand who we are, where we come from and how we evolved is part of what makes us human.

This an exciting time to be examining human evolution. Intriguing fossil and archaeological discoveries, combined with innovative techniques and DNA research, are transforming scientists' understanding of our ancient past.

We now know of more than 20 hominin species that are part of our family tree. At least half of these species are based on fossils unearthed in the last 30 years.

Museum scientists are at the forefront of research on the migration, characteristics and capabilities of these early human relatives, and the origin and cultural development of our species, Homo sapiens.

Trace the evolution of humans since our lineage split from that of chimpanzees, explore what we have in common with our ancient relatives and discover research that is helping to answer questions about our past and future.

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Find out about the origin of modern humans - our species, Homo sapiens. Explore our family tree and hominin characteristics. Discover what Neanderthals looked like.

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https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/when-did-the-human-mind-evolve-to-what-it-is-today-140507905/

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Archaeologists are finding signs of surprisingly sophisticated behavior in the ancient fossil record

smithsonian.com

Archaeologists excavating a cave on the coast of South Africa not long ago unearthed an unusual abalone shell. Inside was a rusty red substance. After analyzing the mixture and nearby stone grinding tools, the researchers realized they had found the world's earliest known paint, made 100,000 years ago from charcoal, crushed animal bones, iron-rich rock and an unknown liquid. The abalone shell was a storage container-a prehistoric paint can.

The find revealed more than just the fact that people used paints so long ago. It provided a peek into the minds of early humans. Combining materials to create a product that doesn't resemble the original ingredients and saving the concoction for later suggests people at the time were capable of abstract thinking, innovation and planning for the future.

These are among the mental abilities that many anthropologists say distinguished humans, Homo sapiens, from other hominids. Yet researchers have no agreed-upon definition of exactly what makes human cognition so special.

"It's hard enough to tell what the cognitive abilities are of somebody who's standing in front of you," says Alison Brooks, an archaeologist at George Washington University and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. "So it's really hard to tell for someone who's been dead for half a million years or a quarter million years."

Since archaeologists can't administer psychological tests to early humans, they have to examine artifacts left behind. When new technologies or ways of living appear in the archaeological record, anthropologists try to determine what sort of novel thinking was required to fashion a spear, say, or mix paint or collect shellfish. The past decade has been particularly fruitful for finding such evidence. And archaeologists are now piecing together the patterns of behavior recorded in the archaeological record of the past 200,000 years to reconstruct the trajectory of how and when humans started to think and act like modern people.

There was a time when they thought they had it all figured out. In the 1970s, the consensus was simple: Modern cognition evolved in Europe 40,000 years ago. That's when cave art, jewelry and sculpted figurines all seemed to appear for the first time. The art was a sign that humans could use symbols to represent their world and themselves, archaeologists reasoned, and therefore probably had language, too. Neanderthals living nearby didn't appear to make art, and thus symbolic thinking and language formed the dividing line between the two species' mental abilities. (Today, archaeologists debate whether, and to what degree, Neanderthals were symbolic beings.)

One problem with this analysis was that the earliest fossils of modern humans came from Africa and dated to as many as 200,000 years ago-roughly 150,000 years before people were depicting bison and horses on cave walls in Spain. Richard Klein, a paleoanthropologist at Stanford University, suggested that a genetic mutation occurred 40,000 years ago and caused an abrupt revolution in the way people thought and behaved.

In the decades following, however, archaeologists working in Africa brought down the notion that there was a lag between when the human body evolved and when modern thinking emerged. "As researchers began to more intensely investigate regions outside of Europe, the evidence of symbolic behavior got older and older," says archaeologist April Nowell of the University of Victoria in Canada.

For instance, artifacts recovered over the past decade in South Africa- such as pigments made from red ochre, perforated shell beads and ostrich shells engraved with geometric designs-have pushed back the origins of symbolic thinking to more than 70,000 years ago, and in some cases, to as early as 164,000 years ago. Now many anthropologists agree that modern cognition was probably in place when Homo sapiens emerged.

"It always made sense that the origins of modern human behavior, the full assembly of modern uniqueness, had to occur at the origin point of the lineage," says Curtis Marean, a paleoanthropologist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

Marean thinks symbolic thinking was a crucial change in the evolution of the human mind. "When you have that, you have the ability to develop language. You have the ability to exchange recipes of technology," he says. It also aided the formation of extended, long-distance social and trading networks, which other hominids such as Neanderthals lacked. These advances enabled humans to spread into new, more complex environments, such as coastal locales, and eventually across the entire planet. "The world was their oyster," Marean says.

But symbolic thinking may not account for all of the changes in the human mind, says Thomas Wynn, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado. Wynn and his colleague, University of Colorado psychologist Frederick Coolidge, suggest that advanced "working memory" was the final critical step toward modern cognition.

Working memory allows the brain to retrieve, process and hold in mind several chunks of information all at one time to complete a task. A particularly sophisticated kind of working memory "involves the ability to hold something in attention while you're being distracted," Wynn says. In some ways, it's kind of like multitasking. And it's needed in problem solving, strategizing, innovating and planning. In chess, for example, the brain has to keep track of the pieces on the board, anticipate the opponent's next several steps and prepare (and remember) countermoves for each possible outcome.

Finding evidence of this kind of cognition is challenging because humans don't use advanced working memory all that much. "It requires a lot of effort," Wynn says. "If we don't have to use it, we don't." Instead, during routine tasks, the brain is sort of on autopilot, like when you drive your car to work. You're not really thinking about it. Based on frequency alone, behaviors requiring working memory are less likely to be preserved than common activities that don't need it, such as making simple stone choppers and handaxes.

Yet there are artifacts that do seem to relate to advanced working memory. Making tools composed of separate pieces, like a hafted spear or a bow and arrow, are examples that date to more than 70,000 years ago. But the most convincing example may be animal traps, Wynn says. At South Africa's Sibudu cave, Lyn Wadley, an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand, has found clues that humans were hunting large numbers of small, and sometimes dangerous, forest animals, including bush pigs and diminutive antelopes called blue duikers. The only plausible way to capture such critters was with snares and traps.

With a trap, you have to think up a device that can snag and hold an animal and then return later to see whether it worked. "That's the kind of thing working memory does for us," Wynn says. "It allows us to work out those kinds of problems by holding the necessary information in mind."

It may be too simple to say that symbolic thinking, language or working memory is the single thing that defines modern cognition, Marean says. And there still could be important components that haven't yet been identified. What's needed now, Wynn adds, is more experimental archaeology. He suggests bringing people into a psych lab to evaluate what cognitive processes are engaged when participants make and use the tools and technology of early humans.

Another area that needs more investigation is what happened after modern cognition evolved. The pattern in the archaeological record shows a gradual accumulation of new and more sophisticated behaviors, Brooks says. Making complex tools, moving into new environments, engaging in long distance trade and wearing personal adornments didn't all show up at once at the dawn of modern thinking.

The appearance of a slow and steady buildup may just be a consequence of the quirks of preservation. Organic materials like wood often decompose without a trace, so some signs of behavior may be too ephemeral to find. It's also hard to spot new behaviors until they become widely adopted, so archaeologists are unlikely to ever locate the earliest instances of novel ways of living.

Complex lifestyles might not have been needed early on in the history of Homo sapiens, even if humans were capable of sophisticated thinking. Sally McBrearty, an archaeologist at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, points out in the 2007 book Rethinking the Human Revolution that certain developments might have been spurred by the need to find additional resources as populations expanded. Hunting and gathering new types of food, such as blue duikers, required new technologies.

Some see a slow progression in the accumulation of knowledge, while others see modern behavior evolving in fits and starts. Archaeologist Franceso d'Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France suggests certain advances show up early in the archaeological record only to disappear for tens of thousands of years before these behaviors-for whatever reason-get permanently incorporated into the human repertoire about 40,000 years ago. "It's probably due to climatic changes, environmental variability and population size," d'Errico says.
Erin Wayman writes Smithsonian.com's Homind Hunting blog.
He notes that several tool technologies and aspects of symbolic expression, such as pigments and engraved artifacts, seem to disappear after 70,000 years ago. The timing coincides with a global cold spell that made Africa drier. Populations probably dwindled and fragmented in response to the climate change. Innovations might have been lost in a prehistoric version of the Dark Ages. And various groups probably reacted in different ways depending on cultural variation, d'Errico says. "Some cultures for example are more open to innovation."

Perhaps the best way to settle whether the buildup of modern behavior was steady or punctuated is to find more archaeological sites to fill in the gaps. There are only a handful of sites, for example, that cover the beginning of human history. "We need those [sites] that date between 125,000 and 250,000 years ago," Marean says. "That's really the sweet spot."

About Erin Wayman

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When Did the Human Mind Evolve to What It is Today?

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smithsonian.com Archaeologists excavating a cave on the coast of South Africa not long ago unearthed an unusual abalone shell. Inside was a rusty red substance. After analyzing the mixture and nearby stone grinding tools, the researchers realized they had found the world's earliest known paint, made 100,000 years ago from charcoal, crushed animal bones, iron-rich rock and an unknown liquid.

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https://www.britannica.com/science/human-evolution

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human evolution, the process by which human beings developed on Earth from now-extinct primates. Viewed zoologically, we humans are Homo sapiens, a culture-bearing upright-walking species that lives on the ground and very likely first evolved in Africa about 315,000 years ago. We are now the only living members of what many zoologists refer to as the human tribe, Hominini, but there is abundant fossil evidence to indicate that we were preceded for millions of years by other hominins, such as Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, and other species of Homo, and that our species also lived for a time contemporaneously with at least one other member of our genus, H. neanderthalensis (the Neanderthals). In addition, we and our predecessors have always shared Earth with other apelike primates, from the modern-day gorilla to the long-extinct Dryopithecus. That we and the extinct hominins are somehow related and that we and the apes, both living and extinct, are also somehow related is accepted by anthropologists and biologists everywhere. Yet the exact nature of our evolutionary relationships has been the subject of debate and investigation since the great British naturalist Charles Darwin published his monumental books On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871). Darwin never claimed, as some of his Victorian contemporaries insisted he had, that "man was descended from the apes," and modern scientists would view such a statement as a useless simplification-just as they would dismiss any popular notions that a certain extinct species is the " missing link" between humans and the apes. There is theoretically, however, a common ancestor that existed millions of years ago. This ancestral species does not constitute a "missing link" along a lineage but rather a node for divergence into separate lineages. This ancient primate has not been identified and may never be known with certainty, because fossil relationships are unclear even within the human lineage, which is more recent. In fact, the human "family tree" may be better described as a "family bush," within which it is impossible to connect a full chronological series of species, leading to Homo sapiens, that experts can agree upon.
(Read T. H. Huxley's 1875 Britannica essay on evolution & biology.)
The primary resource for detailing the path of human evolution will always be fossil specimens. Certainly, the trove of fossils from Africa and Eurasia indicates that, unlike today, more than one species of our family has lived at the same time for most of human history. The nature of specific fossil specimens and species can be accurately described, as can the location where they were found and the period of time when they lived; but questions of how species lived and why they might have either died out or evolved into other species can only be addressed by formulating scenarios, albeit scientifically informed ones. These scenarios are based on contextual information gleaned from localities where the fossils were collected. In devising such scenarios and filling in the human family bush, researchers must consult a large and diverse array of fossils, and they must also employ refined excavation methods and records, geochemical dating techniques, and data from other specialized fields such as genetics, ecology and paleoecology, and ethology ( animal behaviour)-in short, all the tools of the multidisciplinary science of paleoanthropology.

This article is a discussion of the broad career of the human tribe from its probable beginnings millions of years ago in the Miocene Epoch (23 million to 5.3 million years ago [mya]) to the development of tool-based and symbolically structured modern human culture only tens of thousands of years ago, during the geologically recent Pleistocene Epoch (about 2.6 million to 11,700 years ago). Particular attention is paid to the fossil evidence for this history and to the principal models of evolution that have gained the most credence in the scientific community. See the article evolution for a full explanation of evolutionary theory, including its main proponents both before and after Darwin, its arousal of both resistance and acceptance in society, and the scientific tools used to investigate the theory and prove its validity.

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Human evolution | History, Stages, Timeline, Tree, Chart, & Facts

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Human evolution, the process by which human beings developed on Earth from now-extinct primates. The only extant members of the human tribe, Hominini, belong to the species Homo sapiens. The exact nature of the evolutionary relationships between modern humans and their ancestors remains the subject of debate.

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Explore National Geographic. A world leader in geography, cartography and exploration.

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The earliest forms of people in order-
1. Homo Habillis
2. Homo Erectus
3. Homo Heidelbergenesis
4. Neanderthals
5. Homo Sapiens   (modern people)