50 Fun Facts About Human Evolution

The famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton nicknamed Lucy was discovered in 1974 in which country?

Ethiopia. Donald Johanson spotted an arm bone poking out of a slope at Hadar, and three weeks of digging recovered about 40% of one skeleton, far more than anyone then had of so early an ancestor.

Lucy the fossil was named after a song by which band, played in camp the night she was found?

The Beatles. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds played over and over on the camp's tape recorder as the team celebrated that night, and the nickname stuck years before her species had a scientific name.

Lucy's small skull and two-legged gait support which idea about the order of human evolution?

Bipedalism came before larger brains. Lucy's brain was about the size of a chimpanzee's, and a 2016 study argued that this upright walker died falling from a tree, though many scientists dispute it.

Homo floresiensis, the 'Hobbit', was discovered in 2003 on an island of which country?

Indonesia. The adult dug out of Liang Bua cave on Flores stood only about a metre tall, which earned the species its nickname from Tolkien's little people, and it has turned up nowhere else.

Which evolutionary process is the leading explanation for the unusual body size of Homo floresiensis?

Insular dwarfism. Cut off where food is short and predators are few, large animals tend to shrink over many generations, and the pygmy elephants of Flores went the same way.

The first recognised Neanderthal fossil was discovered in 1856 in the Neander Valley of which country?

Germany. The bones gave the whole species its name, yet they were not the first to be found: a Neanderthal skull dug up in 1829 had sat unrecognised for decades.

Roughly how long ago did the last Neanderthals die out, not long after modern humans spread into Europe?

40,000 years ago. The two kinds of human overlapped for a few thousand years first and had children together, which is why traces of Neanderthal DNA survive in people alive today.

Which geneticist led the team that published the Neanderthal genome in 2010?

Svante Pääbo. He spent years learning to read DNA that had broken into tiny, contaminated fragments in old bones, and the genome showed that Neanderthals had interbred with our own species.

About what share of the DNA of people from outside Africa comes from Neanderthal ancestors?

About 2%. The share is small but not idle: some of the inherited Neanderthal genes still shape how our immune systems respond to infections.

On average, in which of these did Neanderthals outmeasure people living today?

Brain size. Their skulls held as much as ours and often more, about 1,500 cubic centimetres on average, which fits their heavier, more muscular bodies rather than proving they were cleverer.

Shanidar Cave, where a Neanderthal lay buried among clumps of flower pollen, is in the Kurdish mountains of which country?

Iraq. Another man buried in the cave had lived for years with a crushed eye socket and a withered arm, which suggests the rest of his group looked after him.

The Denisovans were first identified in 2010 from DNA in what kind of remains from a Siberian cave?

A juvenile finger bone. The scrap of little finger held DNA so well preserved that a whole new kind of human was recognised from it, years before anyone knew what a Denisovan face looked like.

'Denny', a first-generation hybrid found in Denisova Cave, had parents from which two groups?

Denisovan father, Neanderthal mother. Her bone lay among more than 2,000 unidentified scraps until a protein test flagged it as human; she was a girl of at least 13 who lived some 90,000 years ago.

Who found the partial Denisovan jawbone, described in 2019, in a Tibetan Plateau cave decades earlier?

A Buddhist monk. He came across it in Baishiya Karst Cave in 1980, and it then sat in storage for decades until proteins in the bone, not DNA, revealed whose jaw it was.

Which living peoples carry up to about 5% Denisovan DNA, among the largest shares known?

Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians. Their ancestors met Denisovans on the way through southern Asia, and some of the inherited genes seem to have helped islanders' immune systems cope with new diseases.

Which extinct species is generally considered the first human to have spread out of Africa and across Asia?

Homo erectus. Long legs and a body built for covering ground are among the changes thought to have let it range so far, and the species went on to last well over a million years.

On which island did Dutch surgeon Eugène Dubois dig up his 'missing link' ape-man skullcap in 1891?

Java. Dubois had joined the Dutch colonial army as a medical officer so that he could hunt for early humans in the East Indies, at a time when none had yet been found in Africa.

The Peking Man fossils vanished in 1941 while being sent for safekeeping to which country?

United States. American Marines were to carry two footlockers of bones to a ship and on to a New York museum, but they left the college days before Pearl Harbor and were never seen again; only casts survive.

Turkana Boy, one of the most complete early human skeletons ever found, was unearthed in 1984 in which country?

Kenya. Fossil hunter Kamoya Kimeu spotted the first tiny fragment of skull on a riverbank near Lake Turkana; the boy was still growing, yet already stood over 1.5 metres tall.

What does the name Homo habilis literally mean?

Handy man. Stone tools lay near its fossils, so its discoverers took it for the toolmaker, though putting it in our own genus in 1964 set off years of argument.

Puncture marks in the eye sockets of the Taung Child suggest the young australopith was killed by which predator?

An eagle. The marks match those that eagles' talons leave when they snatch monkeys in Africa today, an irony for a species once cast as a bloodthirsty 'killer ape'.

Raymond Dart argued the Taung Child walked upright partly because which skull opening sat forward?

Foramen magnum. It is the hole where the spinal cord leaves the skull, and set well forward it means the head balanced on top of an upright spine instead of hanging out in front.

Which scientist's team found the Laetoli footprints, made over 3.5 million years ago?

Mary Leakey. Her team stumbled on animal tracks at the site in 1976, and two years later it found the trail of about 70 prints made by upright walkers.

What fresh layer preserved the Laetoli footprints?

Volcanic ash. Light rain had turned it to something like wet cement when early humans walked across, and a later eruption sealed their tracks under more ash.

Which author living near Piltdown was once a suspect in the fossil hoax?

Arthur Conan Doyle. He knew the finder, Charles Dawson, but a 2016 study of the forged bones tied every fake to Dawson himself; the fraud had been exposed in 1953.

The Piltdown Man forgery combined a modern human cranium with the jaw of which animal?

An orangutan. The forger filed the teeth flat to mimic human wear and stained the bones to look ancient, a trick that kept scientists arguing for some 40 years.

Animal remains near Ardi, the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus skeleton, suggest she lived in what kind of environment?

Forest. That upset the long-held idea that our ancestors first stood upright when drying climates pushed them out onto open grassland.

Although Ardi could walk on two legs, which ape-like feature did she keep?

Opposable big toes. They could grasp like thumbs, yet her pelvis was shorter and broader than an ape's, which her discoverers read as the mark of an upright walker.

In which country was Toumaï, the 7-million-year-old Sahelanthropus skull, discovered?

Chad. The skull lay in the Djurab desert, a long way west of the East African sites that made the Rift Valley famous, and its nickname means 'hope of life' in a local language.

Homo naledi was discovered in 2013 deep inside a cave system in which country?

South Africa. Two recreational cavers found the bones, and the digs that followed recovered more than 1,550 pieces from at least 15 individuals, the largest single-species haul of early human fossils in Africa.

Lee Berger's six 'Underground Astronauts' on the Homo naledi dig were chosen for what quality?

Their slender build. The bones lay beyond a chute too tight for most adults, so Lee Berger advertised on Facebook for small, slim scientists who could also cave, and the six he picked were all women.

The 'Nutcracker Man' skull of 1959 and the first Homo habilis fossils both came from which site?

Olduvai Gorge. The skull's huge jaws and back teeth earned the nickname, yet wear on such teeth suggests the species was no nutcracker and mostly chewed softer or grassy foods.

What are the oldest complete wooden hunting weapons ever found, left by early humans beside a lake at Schöningen?

Spears. They turned up in an open-cast coal mine among the butchered bones of wild horses, evidence that humans were organised big-game hunters hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The Jebel Irhoud fossils, redated in 2017 to about 315,000 years as the oldest Homo sapiens, are from which country?

Morocco. The new date pushed our species' origins back by about 100,000 years and showed that early Homo sapiens were not confined to East Africa, where the oldest fossils had been known until then.

Which bony feature of the modern human face did Neanderthals and other extinct humans lack?

A chin. Neanderthal and 'Hobbit' jaws slope away without one, and no other primate has one either, which makes a pointed chin one of the quickest ways to tell a modern human skull from an ancient one.

Stone tools found at Lomekwi are older than any from which toolmaking tradition, long regarded as the earliest?

Oldowan. The Lomekwi flakes are dated to about 3.3 million years, before the oldest known fossils of our own genus, so toolmaking can no longer be assumed to have begun with Homo.

Dmanisi, home to Homo fossils about 1.8 million years old, is in which country?

Georgia. One old man found there had lost nearly all his teeth long before he died, so he may have survived only because others in his group helped him to eat.

In which 1871 book did Charles Darwin finally apply his theory of evolution directly to humans?

The Descent of Man. In it Darwin reasoned that our early ancestors probably lived in Africa, because that is where our nearest ape relatives live, decades before any fossil evidence turned up there.

With which anatomist did Thomas Henry Huxley debate human evolution around his 1863 book Man's Place in Nature?

Richard Owen. The man who gave dinosaurs their name had been Darwin's friend for 20 years before turning on his theory, and he is said to have coached Bishop Wilberforce for his famous clash with Huxley.

What is the popular name for the matrilineal most recent common ancestor of all living humans?

Mitochondrial Eve. She was neither the first woman nor the only one alive in her day: she is simply the most recent woman to whom everyone living can trace an unbroken line of mothers.

Lake Toba, site of the supereruption behind the human bottleneck theory, is on which island?

Sumatra. The eruption about 74,000 years ago was once blamed for nearly wiping out humanity, but traces of its fallout lie in settlements thousands of kilometres away where people lived on and even thrived.

Besides the chimpanzee, which living ape is equally our closest relative?

Bonobo. It and the chimpanzee are close cousins whose shared line parted from ours several million years ago, so both differ from us genetically by the same small margin, about 1.2%.

On Flores, home of the 'Hobbit', elephants shrank over time while which small animals grew to giant size?

Rats. Islands tend to shrink big animals and enlarge small ones, and the giant rats may have been Hobbit prey; the Hobbits themselves vanished about 50,000 years ago, not 12,000 as first thought.

Homo naledi's species name, a nod to the cave system where it was found, means what in the Sotho language?

Star. The bones came from the Rising Star caves, and the species, with a brain barely bigger than a chimpanzee's, proved to be only about 300,000 years old, far younger than it looks.

Neanderthal DNA shows variants for which hair colour in some individuals, though it was apparently not common?

Red. The gene variant turned up in two Neanderthals, from Spain and Italy, yet no living person carries that exact mutation, so the two kinds of human seem to have come by red hair independently.

Which 18th-century naturalist coined the name Homo sapiens for our own human species?

Carl Linnaeus. He put humans in the same order as the apes and monkeys, the Primates, in his system of classification, a full century before Darwin offered a reason why they belong together.

Scientists have tried to date the invention of clothing by studying the DNA of which human parasite?

Lice. Body lice live in clothing, so the point where they split from head lice, put at roughly 100,000 to 170,000 years ago, hints at when people first dressed, though some researchers doubt the method.

Which innovation does Richard Wrangham argue made bigger human brains possible about 1.8 million years ago?

Cooking with fire. Cooked food gives more energy for less chewing, which Wrangham ties to our smaller guts, jaws and teeth; critics reply that firm traces of cooking fires are far younger than that.

Which model was the long-time rival of 'Out of Africa' in the debate over modern human origins?

Multiregional. For years fossils alone could not settle the argument, until DNA studies backed a single African origin, though with some interbreeding with older humans along the way.

Which ability evolved in some human populations only within the last 10,000 years?

Digesting milk as adults. Most adults worldwide still cannot, but mutations that keep the milk-sugar enzyme switched on spread among herders in Europe and, separately, in Africa once people kept cattle.