100 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.

Which animal's head tops the human body of the Hohlenstein-Stadel figurine, carved from ivory during the last Ice Age?

A lion of the extinct cave species tops the figure, the oldest confirmed statue ever found. Its 200-plus fragments lay forgotten in a museum for about thirty years.

Which painted cave, found by four teenagers in 1940, closed in 1963 because visitors' breath was harming its art?

Lascaux drew 1,200 visitors a day, and the carbon dioxide they breathed out visibly damaged paintings made at least 17,000 years ago. Tourists were sent to replicas instead.

Which musical instruments, carved from vulture bone and ivory at least 35,000 years ago, are the oldest yet found?

Flutes from caves in the Swabian Jura show that music is as old as the earliest figurative art, which was found in the same caves. One has five finger holes.

Which animal did Ice Age people domesticate first, thousands of years before anyone planted the first crops?

The dog descends from wolves that took up with human camps, and it remains the only large carnivore people have ever domesticated.

DNA from Cheddar Man, a 10,000-year-old skeleton from a Somerset cave, pointed to which combination of looks?

Dark skin, blue-green eyes and dark hair are the likeliest reading of his genes. Paler skin became common in Europe only later, among farming peoples.

Springy Achilles tendons and abundant sweat glands are cited as human adaptations for which activity?

Long-distance running may have let early humans chase prey through the midday heat until it collapsed, a tactic known as persistence hunting.

Which small bone at the base of the human spine is the remnant of a tail that distant ancestors had?

The coccyx is three to five small vertebrae, and every human embryo grows a visible tail for about four weeks before it shrinks away.

About 15,000 years ago, Ice Age people at Mezhyrich in Ukraine built huts from the bones of which animals?

Mammoths supplied the bones, skulls and tusks for all four huts, which came to light in 1965 when a farmer enlarging his cellar dug up a jawbone.

The sickle cell gene stayed common in parts of Africa because carrying one copy protects against which disease?

Malaria kills fewer carriers of a single sickle cell gene, so natural selection kept the gene in circulation even though two copies cause a serious blood disease.

Who is credited with pointing Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola to the Ice Age paintings of Altamira cave in 1879?

His young daughter María, aged eight, is the one credited. Experts then accused him of forgery, since the bison on the ceiling seemed too skilful to be prehistoric.

The pigment melanin, abundant in the skin of peoples from sunny regions, evolved mainly as a shield against what?

Ultraviolet rays break down folate, a vitamin vital in pregnancy, so heavy pigmentation was favoured once our ancestors had lost their body hair.

A gene variant that Tibetans inherited from Denisovans helps them cope with which environmental challenge?

Thin mountain air holds too little oxygen for most lowlanders, but the EPAS1 variant, picked up through ancient interbreeding, improves oxygen transport.

Which feature of the human spine brings the body's centre of gravity over the hips for upright walking?

An S-shaped curve does the job: without its inward bend in the lower back, the body would tip forward and standing would cost far more muscular effort.

What name do anthropologists give societies, like all humans before farming, that live on wild plants and game?

Hunter-gatherers describes every human society for at least 90 percent of our history, usually living in mobile bands of only a few dozen people.

Which stone was a favourite Stone Age toolmaking material because it splits into thin, razor-sharp flakes when struck?

Flint breaks with such a keen edge that toolmakers relied on it for millions of years, and struck against steel it later sparked the flintlock gun.

What common name is given to the third molars, which often lack room to emerge because human jaws have shrunk?

Wisdom teeth helped our ancestors grind tough plant food. As diets softened, smaller jaws were selected for, and some people never grow them at all.

In the scientific name Homo sapiens, the first word, Homo, names which rank of biological classification?

Genus comes first in every two-part scientific name. Homo once held several species at the same time, but ours is the only one left alive.

What does the Latin name Homo sapiens, coined in 1758 for our own species, literally mean?

Wise man is the flattering label our species gave itself. Its opening word, homo, is simply the Latin for a human being of either sex.

Which relatives are central to a leading evolutionary explanation for why women live long past menopause?

Grandmothers who no longer bore children could help feed and mind their grandchildren instead, which raised the odds that their own genes survived.

Thomas Henry Huxley's combative public defence of evolution in Victorian Britain earned him which nickname?

Darwin's Bulldog fought the public battles that the retiring Darwin avoided, and it was Huxley who coined the word 'agnosticism' for his own outlook.

Which name for Europe's earliest modern humans comes from a rock shelter where workmen found skulls in 1868?

Cro-Magnon was the shelter at Les Eyzies where geologist Louis Lartet dug up four adults and an infant. The name soon spread to all of Europe's oldest modern people.

The 'Pit of Bones', a cave shaft holding about 29 early humans some 430,000 years old, lies in which country?

Spain's Atapuerca hills hide the shaft, the Sima de los Huesos. When first reported in 1993, its skeletons were about 80 percent of all human fossils known from their era.

Callao Cave, where teeth and small bones revealed a previously unknown human species in 2019, is in which country?

The Philippines island of Luzon gave Homo luzonensis its name, and reaching that island took a sea crossing of several miles at the very least.

Where is the labourer who found the 'Dragon Man' skull in Harbin in 1933 said to have hidden it?

In an abandoned well, by his family's account, the skull stayed for decades until his grandson gave it to scientists in 2018. DNA later showed that it belonged to a Denisovan.

Who found the first fossil of Australopithecus sediba, a collarbone, while exploring near Malapa Cave in 2008?

The dig leader's son Matthew Berger, aged nine, spotted the bone while exploring the site run by his father, the palaeoanthropologist Lee Berger.

Which nickname belongs to the near-complete Sterkfontein skeleton that took around 15 years to free from solid rock?

Little Foot got the name when four small ankle bones in a museum box showed that their owner, an Australopithecus, walked upright. About 90 percent of the body was later recovered.

Which ailment in the La Chapelle skeleton has been blamed for Marcellin Boule's image of stooping Neanderthals?

Arthritis had badly worn the elderly man's joints. Boule's reconstruction of a slouching brute, published from 1911, shaped popular ideas of Neanderthals for over thirty years.

A Neanderthal skull turned up at Forbes' Quarry in 1848, eight years before the Neander Valley find, in which territory?

Gibraltar might have given the species its name, but nobody grasped what the skull was, and it sat forgotten in a library cupboard for many years.

Ice Age people at Gough's Cave in Somerset carefully shaped human skulls into which objects about 14,700 years ago?

Cups cut from skulls lay among human bones bearing butchery marks, evidence that the cave's occupants practised cannibalism.

Chemical tests on the teeth of 'Nutcracker Man', Paranthropus boisei, showed it mainly ate which foods rather than nuts?

Grasses and sedges, not nuts, left their chemical signature in the enamel. The nickname came from newspapers struck by the huge back teeth and jaws.

Which small horseshoe-shaped bone in the Kebara 2 skeleton fuelled claims that Neanderthals could talk?

The hyoid anchors the tongue and sits just above the voice box. The Kebara one, dug up in Israel in 1983, was virtually identical to a modern person's.

The FOXP2 gene, studied in Neanderthal DNA for clues to their abilities, was first discovered through its link to what?

Speech and language trouble passed down in one British family led researchers to the gene, and the Neanderthal version proved largely similar to ours.

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes while the other great apes have 24 because of which event in our ancestry?

Two fused into one, end to end, making human chromosome 2, which keeps leftover tip sequences, called telomeres, stranded far from either of its ends.

The 'expensive tissue hypothesis' says human ancestors afforded bigger brains by shrinking which other costly body part?

The gut of a human is smaller than expected for an ape of our size, and the energy saved almost completely covers the energy bill of the larger brain.

Humans carry extra copies of the gene for amylase, an enzyme in saliva, which helps digest which food component?

Starch-rich diets favoured the extra copies: peoples who traditionally eat plenty of starch carry more copies of the gene, on average, than peoples who eat little.

The Bajau 'sea nomads' of Southeast Asia have evolved an enlarged version of which organ, aiding long breath-hold dives?

The spleen of a Bajau diver is about 50 percent larger than a land-dwelling neighbour's, and it squeezes extra oxygen-carrying blood into circulation at depth.

The oldest known human footprints outside Africa were exposed on a beach in 2013, then washed away, in which country?

England's Norfolk coast at Happisburgh held the prints, left around 900,000 years ago. Scientists photographed them in 3D before the tide destroyed them within two weeks.

'Nebraska Man', hailed in 1922 as an early ape of North America, was based on a single tooth of which animal?

A peccary, a pig-like hoofed mammal, owned the worn tooth. The ape claim was withdrawn in 1927, after more pieces of the animal had been dug up.

Denisova Cave, which gave the Denisovans their name, is said to be named after which kind of 18th-century resident?

A hermit called Dyonisiy, or Denis, is said to have lived in the cave in the 18th century, so a whole branch of humanity may carry the name of a religious recluse.

Which extinct ape was first identified from molars that Ralph von Koenigswald found in a Hong Kong drugstore in 1935?

Gigantopithecus teeth were on sale as medicinal 'dragon bones'. During the war von Koenigswald hid them in a bottle buried in a friend's backyard.

Which East African landform, torn open as the continent slowly splits, has yielded Lucy and many other hominin fossils?

The Great Rift Valley marks a line where the African plate is pulling apart by a few millimetres a year, and its fossils include apes that lived 10 million years ago.

Pierced sea-snail shells about 100,000 years old are among the oldest known examples of which human invention?

Jewellery in the form of shell beads shows that people were decorating themselves long before the first known cave paintings were made.

Which earthy pigment was used like a crayon to draw a cross-hatched pattern at Blombos Cave some 73,000 years ago?

Ochre lines on a flake of stone from the cave are believed to be the earliest known drawing. Older layers there held a paint workshop, with pigment mixed in abalone shells.

A 2016 study of fractures in the bones of Lucy, the famous Australopithecus, proposed that she died in which way?

Falling from a tree would be an ironic end for a pioneer of upright walking, and it fits signs that her species spent part of its time in the branches.

What does the name Australopithecus, which Raymond Dart gave the Taung Child skull in 1925, literally mean?

Southern ape blends the Latin australis with the Greek pithekos. Dart wrote the paper naming it only forty days after he first saw the fossil.

Which biologist named the hypothetical ape-man Pithecanthropus years before Eugène Dubois went looking for it?

Ernst Haeckel described the creature in detail before a single bone was known, and he later placed its homeland on the imaginary lost continent of Lemuria.

The Kabwe skull, also called Broken Hill Man, was struck by a miner's pickaxe in 1921 in which present-day country?

Zambia was then Northern Rhodesia, hence the skull's other old name, Rhodesian Man. It was shipped to the British Museum, and Zambia has since asked for its return.

Which human species was named in 1908 from a single jawbone that workers dug out of a sand pit at Mauer?

Homo heidelbergensis takes its name from the university city of Heidelberg, ten kilometres from the pit. The jaw was then the oldest human fossil known in Europe.

Neanderthals made which adhesive by heating tree bark without air, as early as 200,000 years ago?

Birch tar gave small stone tools a grip, as finds from the North Sea and Italy show, and it is made by the dry distillation of bark.

Which technique, devised by Willard Libby, cannot give the age of fossils much older than about 50,000 years?

Radiocarbon dating counts a form of carbon that halves every 5,730 years, so after about 50,000 years too little is left to measure. Libby won a Nobel Prize for it.