One Long Chain: Human Evolution

Human evolution is a gradual process, so there wasn’t a single “first human”; rather, it’s a long family tree with many branches.

In human evolution, there wasn’t a single day when a non-human mother suddenly gave birth to a fully modern human child.

Instead, change happened gradually over thousands of generations.

Early Homo sapiens emerged from ancestral populations of Homo heidelbergensis and other hominins in Africa around 300,000 years ago.

Over time, the traits we call “human”, larger brains, symbolic thinking, and complex language, became more pronounced.

So, while scientists can pinpoint a period when we can classify a population as Homo sapiens, that moment was more like a slow fade-in than a light switch being flipped.

Our DNA still carries echoes of those earlier ancestors, reminding us that we’re part of one long, unbroken chain of life.

The evolution of humans is exactly that, a slow fade across countless generations into what we’d eventually recognize as fully modern.

And what’s truly remarkable is how genetically similar we are today.

Humans share about 99.9% of their DNA when looking at the most common variations (single nucleotide polymorphisms), and approximately 99.5% when including all types of genetic differences, such as insertions, deletions, and structural variants.

This underscores that, despite superficial differences, we are far more alike than different.