Notable members of Homo. Clockwise from top left: An approximate reconstruction of a Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) skeleton, a modern human (Homo sapiens) female with a child, a reconstructed Homo habilis skull, and a replica skull of Peking Man (subspecies of Homo erectus).
Homo (from Latinhomō 'human') is a genus of great ape that emerged from the genus Australopithecus and encompasses the extant species Homo sapiens (modern humans) and a number of extinct species classified as either ancestral to or closely related to modern humans, including Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. The oldest member of the genus is Homo habilis, with records of just over 2 million years ago.[a]Homo, together with the genus Paranthropus, is probably most closely related to the species Australopithecus africanus within Australopithecus.[4] The closest living relatives of Homo are of the genus Pan (which includes chimpanzees and bonobos), with the ancestors of Pan and Homo estimated to have diverged around 5.7-11 million years ago during the Late Miocene.[5]
Homo erectus appeared about 2 million years ago and spread throughout Africa (where it is called H. ergaster) and Eurasia in several migrations. An adaptive and successful species, H. erectus persisted for more than a million years and gradually diverged into new species by around 500,000 years ago.[b][6]
^Stringer, C.B. (1994). "Evolution of early humans". In Jones, S.; Martin, R.; Pilbeam, D. (eds.). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 242.
^Schrenk, F.; Kullmer, O.; Bromage, T. (2007). "Chapter 9: The Earliest Putative Homo Fossils". In Henke, W.; Tattersall, I. (eds.). Handbook of Paleoanthropology. pp. 1611–1631. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-33761-4_52.
^Lowery RK, Uribe G, Jimenez EB, Weiss MA, Herrera KJ, Regueiro M, Herrera RJ (November 2013). "Neanderthal and Denisova genetic affinities with contemporary humans: introgression versus common ancestral polymorphisms". Gene. 530 (1): 83–94. doi:10.1016/j.gene.2013.06.005. PMID23872234.
This study raises the possibility of observed genetic affinities between archaic and modern human populations being mostly due to common ancestral polymorphisms.
Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).