Human evolution over the years ..

I am on the effort trying to understand a bit of human history and how humans have evolved over the years. Who were our ancestors, where do we come from, where are we going to ? After all it is good knowing all things about Science, technology that has helped humanity over the past 500 years, but how did we reach there in the first place. it was a visit to the Ecozone in Toyota plant in Bidadi that got me fascinated about human evolution or anthropology.

Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Wikipedia

Anthropology has been the study of the evolution of humans, what makes us, us ? It is quite interesting to know who our earlier ancestors were. Even though these is a missing link as to how the first australopithecus evolved from apes, about 4.4 million years ago, since we share lot of features in common, our ancestry can scientifically be considered to be from apes.  

Australopithecus lived about 4.4 to 1.6 million years ago around S. Africa

Homo habilis lived 2 to 1.4 million years ago in Africa

Homo erectus have been one of the most successful human species and they lived on planet earth for almost 1.5 million years till about 110,000 years ago. 

Neanderthals as a species moved around Europe between 110,000 to 35,000 years ago.

Homo sapiens, as what we are called, have been around only for 300,000 thousand years and we originated in Africa.

We need to understand that all this evolution happened during the past 4.4 million years from Australopithecus to Homo sapiens. 

I have been doing this reading over the past many years trying to understand how human thinking has evolved over the years and how humans have developed in their physical and mental capacity over the years, especially when we know that the earth is more than 4560 million years old and we humans are barely 4.5 million years old.

What are the features of our cousins that lived on planet earth for at least 4.3 million years and got wiped out leaving only the last human species, Homosapiens left to control it, develop, advance fields of knowledge, spirituality and the like.

Hope in the coming days our discussions on these topics will open up our understanding of the evolution of the human race more than ever.

George