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THEME 10: HUMAN ORIGINS, ENVIRONMENTS AND IMPACTS
Human evolution: a half century of progress
Chris Stringer
Department of Earth Sciences, Natural History Museum, London SW7 5BD
Looking at the last half century of research on human evolution does neatly encapsulate
many of the key developments and discoveries in this field. 1964 was the year of
publication of a new and primitive species, Homo habilis, which took the genus Homo
back to the earliest part of the Quaternary. Highly controversial at the time, the rather
fragmentary nominative material from Olduvai Gorge (Tanzania) was joined in the
following decade by a wealth of more complete fossils from the area now known as East
Turkana (Kenya). That region also provided representatives of the species H. erectus that
appeared more primitive than the long-established examples from Indonesia and China. In
the last two decades Georgia has rather surprisingly added an even richer seam of
primitive erectus material from the site of Dmanisi.
Moving on from the early Quaternary, we have seen the creation of the new species H.
antecessor from fossils dating close to the Brunhes-Matuyama boundary at Atapuerca in
Spain, and the proposal that H. heidelbergensis (named from the Mauer mandible, found
near Heidelberg in 1907) was not just a local European species, but represented a form
that spread across the Old World, and gave rise to both the Neanderthals (H.
neanderthalensis) in western Eurasia and modern humans (H. sapiens) in Africa. An early
stage in the evolution of the Neanderthal lineage has been spectacularly illustrated by the
discovery of a huge cache of fossils in the Sima de los Huesos (‘Pit of the Bones’) deep
within a cave system, also at Atapuerca.
Africa lacks such rich documentation of the earliest stages in the evolution of H. sapiens,
but fossils sharing fundamental aspects of anatomy with modern humans are known from
Ethiopia (Omo Kibish and Herto), dating between 150-200ka.
Within the last 60,000 years modern humans emerged from Africa and soon dispersed
across the more temperate parts of the Old World, reaching Europe and Australia by 45ka.
During that dispersal they must have encountered lineages of other human groups like the
Neanderthals, as well as more recently recognised forms such as the Denisovans (known
from distinctive DNA recovered from Denisova Cave in Siberia), and H. floresiensis
(known from fossil material excavated from Liang Bua on the remote island of Flores).
New investigative techniques have also had a great impact on palaeoanthropological
research, especially during the last two decades. These include direct dating procedures,
isotope studies, scanning through CT and synchrotrons, and the recovery of DNA from
Neanderthal, Denisovan and early modern human fossils. DNA, in particular, has clarified
and complicated our understanding of recent human evolution, in equal measure!
Keywords: human; evolution; palaeontology; Homo; fossil; Pleistocene.