Homo sapiens

The species in brief

Homo sapiens, “wise human”, is us. We are the only human species left, but for most of our history we shared the world with others, among them the Neanderthals, the Denisovans and the small-bodied people of Flores. We first appear in the fossil record in Africa at least 300,000 years ago and are now present on every continent and, for a while, on the International Space Station.

The name was given by Carl Linnaeus in 1758, in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. It was chosen long before any fossil humans were known, so Linnaeus himself was later formally designated the species’ type specimen.

What makes a human a sapiens?

The features that set us apart from other human species are mostly in the skull and the build:

• High, rounded braincase. Our brain averages about 1,350 cubic centimetres, which is not larger than a Neanderthal’s but is shaped differently, rounder and taller, with a steep forehead.
• Small face. A flatter, smaller face tucked under the braincase, with a small brow ridge and, uniquely among humans, a chin.
• Light build. Thinner skull bones and a slender skeleton compared with Neanderthals or Homo erectus.

These features did not all appear together. The earliest sapiens fossils have a modern face but a longer, lower braincase, and the typically “modern” rounded skull appears only over the next 200,000 years or so.

Earliest fossils

• Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. Fossils from at least five individuals, found in a mine from the 1960s onward, were redated in 2017 to about 315,000 years ago. The faces look modern, while the braincase is still long and low. With stone tools and signs of fire, they pushed the age of our species back by about 100,000 years. See Jebel Irhoud.
• Florisbad, South Africa. A partial skull of about 260,000 years.
• Omo Kibish, Ethiopia. Two skulls found by Richard Leakey’s team in 1967. The dating was long given as 195,000 years, but in 2022 a study of the volcanic ash above the site showed that Omo I is more than 233,000 years old.
• Herto, Ethiopia. Skulls about 160,000 years old, found in 1997 and described in 2003 by Tim White and colleagues, including one child’s skull with signs that it was handled after death.
• Misliya Cave, Israel. A jawbone with teeth, about 177,000 to 194,000 years old, the oldest sapiens fossil from outside Africa, reported in 2018.

The picture that emerges is that our species evolved across Africa, from populations that were connected by gene flow, and not in one place and moment.

Out of Africa

Genetic data show that nearly all living non-Africans descend from a population that left Africa between about 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, and then spread rapidly. Earlier groups did leave and are known from sites such as Skhul and Qafzeh in Israel (about 90,000 to 120,000 years old), but many of these lines seem to have died out or mixed in.

The route east and south went along coasts and rivers. By about 65,000 years ago people were in Australia, as stone tools and pigment from Madjedbebe in northern Australia suggest, though that date is still argued over. Fossils at Lake Mungo are about 40,000 years old. Modern humans reached Europe by around 45,000 years ago, and the Americas by at least 16,000 years ago, and probably earlier: footprints at White Sands in New Mexico are dated by some studies to about 21,000 to 23,000 years ago, a claim that has been debated.

Meeting other humans

Ancient DNA has shown that our species met and mixed with other humans. People with ancestry from outside Africa carry about 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA. Many Melanesians and Aboriginal Australians also carry up to about 4 to 5 percent Denisovan DNA. Some of those genes still affect our immunity, skin, and how we cope with altitude. See Neanderthals and Denisova Cave.

Mind and culture

Our species’ archaeological record becomes richer as time goes on, though it is increasingly clear that many traits were not unique to us:

• Symbols and ornaments. Ochre and pierced shell beads from Blombos Cave in South Africa, about 75,000 to 100,000 years old, are among the earliest signs of symbolic behaviour, along with a piece of ochre engraved with a crosshatched pattern.
• Cave art. A painted pig in a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, has been dated to at least 45,000 years ago, and a scene there with human-like figures hunting animals to about 51,000. In Europe the paintings at Chauvet are about 36,000 years old, and at Lascaux about 17,000 years old.
• Technology. Fine blades, bone and antler tools, needles, boats, bows and, later, pottery and farming. Farming began about 11,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, and the first monuments, such as Göbekli Tepe, appeared at about the same time.

Where to see it

The Jebel Irhoud fossils are held in Morocco and studied at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The Omo skulls are in Ethiopia’s National Museum, and the Herto skulls too. Casts of key sapiens fossils, and of Cro-Magnon 1 from France (about 28,000 years old), which was long used as the “type” of early modern European, are displayed in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris and many other museums.

Sources

• Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Human Origins Program. Homo sapiens.
• Hublin, J.-J. and others (2017). New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature 546: 289 to 292.
• Vidal, C. M. and others (2022). Age of the oldest known Homo sapiens from eastern Africa. Nature 601: 579 to 583.
• White, T. D. and others (2003). Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia. Nature 423: 742 to 747.
• Hershkovitz, I. and others (2018). The earliest modern humans outside Africa. Science 359: 456 to 459.
• Clarkson, C. and others (2017). Human occupation of northern Australia by 65,000 years ago. Nature 547: 306 to 310.
• Brumm, A. and others (2021). Oldest cave art found in Sulawesi. Science Advances 7: eabd4648.
• Oktaviana, A. A. and others (2024). Narrative cave art in Indonesia by 51,200 years ago. Nature 631: 814 to 818.