The fossil evidence suggests that anatomically modern humans, those with physical characteristics not too different from our own, emerged in Africa about 200,000 years ago — an exceedingly brief period in evolutionary time. These humans were part of the lineage of hominids, the family of great apes that comprises humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. The branch of that family that leads to humans split off about six million years ago from the last ancestor we shared with our closest relatives, the chimpanzees; the chimpanzee’s DNA sequence is about 99 percent identical to ours. The human evolutionary tree indicates that humans did not evolve from current chimpanzees (or monkeys or gorillas or apes). Rather, both we and chimpanzees evolved from an ancestor no longer in existence who lived about six million years ago and whose various descendants would eventually give rise to two lineages, one that became us, and one that led to today’s chimpanzees.
Anatomically modern humans first appeared in sub-Saharan Africa, and groups of them ventured out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, spreading throughout the Eurasian landmass — the Mediterranean coast, Europe, Russia, and central Asia — and into Australia. They got to Siberia by 30,000 years ago, and then moved across the Bering Strait and into the Americas about 15,000 years ago, along the way inventing paper in China, mathematics in the Middle East, and country music in the United States. The key point to remember here is that humans spent about 150,000 years in Africa before they colonized the rest of the globe.
