Human Evolution Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Human Evolution trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This human evolution trivia quiz walks the family tree from a 7-million-year-old skull in the Chadian desert to the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome. The easy questions cover the famous names: which country Lucy was found in, what the Beatles had to do with her name, which island the 'Hobbit' lived on, where the first Neanderthal fossil turned up and what a Neanderthal ancestor left in the DNA of almost everyone outside Africa. From there it moves through the great discoveries at Olduvai, Laetoli, Zhoukoudian, Java and the Rising Star cave. The hard end is for people who read the papers rather than the headlines: the amateur whose Piltdown 'missing link' fooled science for 40 years, the fossil whose name means 'hope of life', the six slender 'Underground Astronauts', the first-generation hybrid with a Denisovan father and a Neanderthal mother, the jawbone a Buddhist monk found on the Tibetan Plateau and the oldest stone tools ever found, which are older than our genus. Every answer was checked against the encyclopaedia entries on human evolution, Lucy, Homo erectus, Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo naledi, the Taung Child, Laetoli, Piltdown Man and the other fossils named here, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Charles Darwin, dinosaurs and archaeology quizzes are natural next stops.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton nicknamed Lucy was discovered in 1974 in which country?
Ethiopia
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.
Q 02Lucy the fossil was named after a song by which band, played in camp the night she was found?
The Beatles
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.
Q 03Lucy's small skull and two-legged gait support which idea about the order of human evolution?
Bipedalism came before larger brains
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.
Q 04Homo floresiensis, the 'Hobbit', was discovered in 2003 on an island of which country?
Indonesia
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.
Q 05Which evolutionary process is the leading explanation for the unusual body size of Homo floresiensis?
Insular dwarfism
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.
Q 06The first recognised Neanderthal fossil was discovered in 1856 in the Neander Valley of which country?
Germany
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.
Q 07Roughly how long ago did the last Neanderthals die out, not long after modern humans spread into Europe?
40,000 years ago
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.
Q 08Which geneticist led the team that published the Neanderthal genome in 2010?
Svante Pääbo
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.
Q 09About what share of the DNA of people from outside Africa comes from Neanderthal ancestors?
About 2%
About 2%. The share is small but not idle: some of the inherited Neanderthal genes still shape how our immune systems respond to infections.
Q 10On average, in which of these did Neanderthals outmeasure people living today?
Brain size
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.
Q 11Shanidar Cave, where a Neanderthal lay buried among clumps of flower pollen, is in the Kurdish mountains of which country?
Iraq
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.
Q 12The Denisovans were first identified in 2010 from DNA in what kind of remains from a Siberian cave?
A juvenile finger bone
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.
Q 13'Denny', a first-generation hybrid found in Denisova Cave, had parents from which two groups?
Q 21Puncture marks in the eye sockets of the Taung Child suggest the young australopith was killed by which predator?
An eagle
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'.
Q 22Raymond Dart argued the Taung Child walked upright partly because which skull opening sat forward?
Foramen magnum
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.
Q 23Which scientist's team found the Laetoli footprints, made over 3.5 million years ago?
Mary Leakey
Denisovan father, Neanderthal mother
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.
Q 14Who found the partial Denisovan jawbone, described in 2019, in a Tibetan Plateau cave decades earlier?
A Buddhist monk
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.
Q 15Which living peoples carry up to about 5% Denisovan DNA, among the largest shares known?
Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians
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.
Q 16Which extinct species is generally considered the first human to have spread out of Africa and across Asia?
Homo erectus
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.
Q 17On which island did Dutch surgeon Eugène Dubois dig up his 'missing link' ape-man skullcap in 1891?
Java
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.
Q 18The Peking Man fossils vanished in 1941 while being sent for safekeeping to which country?
United States
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.
Q 19Turkana Boy, one of the most complete early human skeletons ever found, was unearthed in 1984 in which country?
Kenya
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.
Q 20What does the name Homo habilis literally mean?
Handy man
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.
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.
Q 24What fresh layer preserved the Laetoli footprints?
Volcanic ash
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.
Q 25Which author living near Piltdown was once a suspect in the fossil hoax?
Arthur Conan Doyle
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.
Q 26The Piltdown Man forgery combined a modern human cranium with the jaw of which animal?
An orangutan
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.
Q 27Animal remains near Ardi, the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus skeleton, suggest she lived in what kind of environment?
Forest
Forest. That upset the long-held idea that our ancestors first stood upright when drying climates pushed them out onto open grassland.
Q 28Although Ardi could walk on two legs, which ape-like feature did she keep?
Opposable big toes
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.
Q 29In which country was Toumaï, the 7-million-year-old Sahelanthropus skull, discovered?
Chad
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.
Q 30Homo naledi was discovered in 2013 deep inside a cave system in which country?
South Africa
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.