Our origin
From monkey to ape to human
About 35 million years ago, with the great apes a new branch on the family tree of life developed. About 20 million years ago, this branch gave rise to the branch of evolution that led to the orangutans, and another branch, about 10 million years ago, from which the gorillas evolved.
Of all the apes today, the closest to modern humans is the chimpanzee. We share about 99 percent of our DNA with it. The evolutionary split between chimpanzees and hominids is thought to have occurred around 7 to 9 million years ago. After that, one lineage led to chimpanzees, while the other, led to hominids such as Australopithecus Afarensis and eventually Homo Sapiens.
Australopithecus, one of our first direct ancestors, lived in Africa around 4 to 2 million years ago. The term Australopithecus is a Latin-Greek made-up word. Since the first bones of Australopithecus were found in South Africa in 1925, it is made up of the Latin word for southern, australis and the Greek word for ape, which is píthēkos.
Those Australopithecus fossils discovered in 1925 are among the first confirmed evidence of human descent from apes in South Africa.
In 1974, the discovery of a female Australopithecus Afarensis skeleton in Ethiopia traced the human family tree back to 3.2 million years. The oldest hominid whose fossils have been discovered to date is Ardipithecus, which also lived in Africa about 5.8 million years ago.
One of the best examples of Australopithecus is provided by 3.6-million-year-old fossil footprints (Textlink 2 footprints) found in Tanzania, East Africa. They show, two adult specimens, side by side, while a smaller one, presumably a child, walking behind them, playfully stepping in the footprints of its parents. This not only confirms that Australopithecus walked upright, but also gives us a rare insight into the lives of these original hominids.
Whether Australopithecus was able to use tools above the level of chimpanzees is not completely clear. Although carved stone tools were found together with fossils, they could not be clearly assigned to Australopitecus.
