We are Hominids, or Hominidae, also known as great apes.

Our taxonomic family of primates includes four extant genera: the chimpanzees (Pan) with two species; gorillas (Gorilla) with two species; humans (Homo) with one species; and orangutans (Pongo) with two species.

Homininae, a subfamily of Hominidae that includes members of hominini—humans, as well as gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and some extinct relatives—comprises all hominids that arose after the split from orangutans (Ponginae).

A number of known extinct genera are grouped with humans in the Homininae subfamily, others with orangutans in the Ponginae subfamily.

The most recent common ancestor of the Hominidae lived roughly fourteen million years ago, when the ancestors of the orangutans speciated from the ancestors of the other three genera.

The subtribe Hominina is the "human" branch, including the genus Homo, which has its beginnings in this eon, which spans a quarter of a million years.

The fossil record suggests that individuals of the species Gigantopithecus blacki are the largest apes that ever lived, standing up to three meters (nine point eight feet feet) and weighing up to five hundred and forty kilograms (one thousand one hundred and ninety pounds).

Gigantopithecus, having come into existence perhaps nine million years ago, exists to as recently one hundred thousand years ago in what is now Nepal, China, India, and Vietnam.

This places Gigantopithecus in the same time frame and geographical location as several hominin species.

In addition to the Homo genus to which we belong, other members of the family include Orrorin, Ardipithecus, Kenyanthropus, and the australopithecines Australopithecus and Paranthropus.

The name of the genus Orrorin means "original man" in Tugen, and the name of the only classified species, O. tugenensis, derives from Tugen Hills in Kenya, where the first fossil was found in 2000, followed by another score or so more in the ensuing years.

Apparently a climber of trees, Orrorin lives in dry evergreen forest environment estimated at six point one million to five point seven million years ago (Mya).

If Orrorin proves to be a direct human ancestor, then australopithecines such as Australopithecus afarensis ("Lucy") may be considered a side branch of the hominid family tree: Orrorin is both earlier, by almost three million years, and more similar to modern humans than is A. afarensis.

The relationship of the Ardipithecus genus to human ancestors, and whether it is a hominin, or not, is unknown.

The literature describes two species: A. kadabba, dated to approximately five point sixmillion years ago (late Miocene), and A. ramidus, which lived about four point four million years ago during the early Pliocene.

Like most hominids, but unlike all previously recognized hominins, it had a grasping hallux or big toe adapted for locomotion in the trees.

It is not confirmed how much other features of its skeleton reflect adaptation to bipedalism on the ground as well.

Like later hominins, Ardipithecus had reduced canine teeth.

The brain of Ardipithecus ramidus, measuring between three hundred and three hundred and fifty square centimeters, is slightly smaller than a modern bonobo or female common chimpanzee brain, but much smaller than the brain of australopithecines like Lucy (around four hundred to five hundred and fifty square kilometers) and roughly twenty percent the size of the modern Homo sapiens brain.

Kenyanthropus platyop, a three point five million to three point two million year-old (Pliocene) hominin fossil discovered in Lake Turkana, Kenya, is believed to have lived in a “mosaic” environment of grassland and some forested areas.

In contrast, their close relative, A. afarensis, found in sites such as Laetoli, Tanzania, and Hadar, Ethiopia, are believed to have spent a lot of time among trees.

Maeve Leakey proposed in 2001 that the fossil represents an entirely new hominine genus, while others classify it as a separate species of Australopithecus, Australopithecus platyops, and yet others interpret it as an individual of Australopithecus afarensis.

Homo erectus becomes extinct, with the known exception of Solo Man in Indonesia, by around 200,000 BCE, while Earth’s only remaining hominid, Homo sapiens Neanderthalensis, or Neanderthal Man, has spread into Europe and the Middle East.

The Neandertals, unlike Homo erectus, have brains similar in size to—or possible larger than—those of modern humans, although Neandertal brains are lighter in front and heavier in back.

They match modern humans in body weight, but are generally shorter, stockier and more muscular.

Although similar in appearance to modern humans, Neandertals have the large teeth, pronounced eyebrow ridges, protuberant jaws, receding chin, and sloping forehead associated with Homo erectus.

The similarity of their tongue bones to those of modern humans suggests that the Neandertals are fully capable of speech.

The Neandertals are the first hominids (as far as is known) to bury their dead and to actively care for aged and crippled members of their communities.

The fact that Neandertal graves contain food indicates a belief in some form of afterlife, although no grave goods have turned up.

Like previous members of the genus Homo, they have tamed fire and use it to roast meat and other foods.

The large animals hunted by the Neandertals include the giant cave bears, the mammoth, and the woolly rhinoceros.

Neandertaler stone implements represent distinct improvement over the tools of Homo erectus: more delicate, more precise, and more varied.

No artwork has been discovered in association with Neandertal sites.

Y-chromosomal Adam, the patrilineal most recent common ancestor, is the male counterpart of Mitochondrial Eve, although they lived thousands of years apart: Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve need not have lived at the same time.

In human genetics, Y-chromosomal Adam (Y-MRCA) is the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) from whom all living people are descended patrilineally (tracing back only along the paternal lines of their family tree)

Recent studies report that Y-chromosomal Adam lived as early as around one hundred and forty-two thousand years ago: older studies estimated Y-MRCA as recent as sixty thousand years ago.

Mitochondrial Eve in the field of human genetics refers to the matrilineal most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of modern humans.

She, in other words, is the woman from whom all living humans today descend, on their mother's side, and through the mothers of those mothers and so on, back until all lines converge on one person.

Because all mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is generally passed from mother to offspring without recombination, all mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) in every living person is directly descended from hers by definition.

Each ancestor (of people now living) in the line back to the matrilineal MRCA had female contemporaries such as sisters, female cousins, etc., and some of these female contemporaries may have descendants living now (with one or more males in their descendancy line), but none of the female contemporaries of the "Mitochondrial Eve" has descendants living now in an unbroken female line.

Mitochondrial Eve is estimated to have lived around two hundred thousand years ago, most likely in East Africa, when Homo sapiens sapiens were developing as a population distinct from other human sub-species.

The foundation population of the humans that today inhabit the world are the survivors of what appears to be an evolutionary bottleneck caused by a global catastrophe during the period that begins around 90,000 BCE.

The Toba supereruption (Youngest Toba Tuff or simply YTT), a supervolcanic eruption that occurs some time between sixty-nine thousand and seventy-seven thousand years ago at Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia, is recognized as one of the Earth's largest known eruptions and is the most closely studied supereruption.

The related catastrophe hypothesis holds that this event plunged the planet into a six-to-ten-year volcanic winter and possibly an additional one thousand-year cooling episode.

This change in temperature results in the world's human population being reduced to ten thousand or even a mere one thousand breeding pairs, creating a bottleneck in human evolution.

Consistent with the Toba catastrophe theory, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has postulated that human mitochondrial DNA (inherited only from one's mother) and Y chromosome DNA (from one's father) show coalescence at around one hundred and forty thousand and sixty thousand years ago, respectively.

In other words, all living humans' female line ancestry traces back to a single female (Mitochondrial Eve) at around one hundred and forty thousand years ago.

All humans can trace their ancestry with certainty via the male line back to a single male (Y-chromosomal Adam) at ninety thousand to sixty thousand years ago.

Anatomically modern and behaviorally modern humans in the southernmost tip of southern Africa inhabit the Klasies River Caves, a series of caves located to the east of the Klasies River mouth on the Tsitsikamma coast in the Humansdorp district of Eastern Cape Province, between 80,000 and 110,000 BCE.

There is a marked difference between the Paleolithic stone technology used in the earliest layers from one hundred and twenty-five thousand years ago years ago, and the superior Mesolithic blades of the seventy-thousand-year-old Howiesons Poort period that used raw material which had been 'mined' twenty kilometers inland.

There is also a differentiation between the Paleolithic food detritus that accumulated underfoot inside the caves one hundred and twenty-five thousand years ago, but is ejected and accumulated into external middens by the Mesolithic occupants circa seventy-five thousand years ago: housekeeping has now become standardized.

Eleven early humans, recognized as advanced members of the species Homo erectus and popularly known as Solo Man (from their grave site on a bank of the Solo River near the village of Ngandong in eastern Java, Indonesia), may have been the victims of cannibalistic activities.

Homo erectus soloensis, formerly classified as Homo sapiens soloensis, is generally now regarded as a subspecies of the extinct hominin, Homo erectus.

The only known specimens of this anomalous hominid were retrieved from sites along the Bengawan Solo River, on the Indonesian island of Java.

The remains are also commonly referred to as Ngandong, after the village near where they were first recovered.

Though its morphology was, for the most part, typical of Homo erectus, its culture was unusually advanced.

While most subspecies of Homo erectus disappeared from the fossil record roughly four hundred thousand years ago, H. e. soloensis persisted up until fifty thousand years ago in regions of Java and was possibly absorbed—or consumed—by a local Homo sapiens population at the time of its decline.

Shanidar Cave, an archaeological site in the Zagros Mountains in South-Kurdistan (in Iraq), located in the valley of the Great Zab, was excavated between 1957-1961 by Ralph Solecki and his team from Columbia University and yielded the first adult Neanderthal skeletons in Iraq, dating between 60-80,000 years BP (Before Present).

The excavated area produced nine skeletons of Neanderthals of varying ages and states of preservation and completeness (labeled Shanidar I - IX).

M. Zeder recently discovered the tenth individual during examination of a faunal assemblage from the site at the Smithsonian Institution.

The remains seemed to Zeder to suggest that Neandertals had funeral ceremonies, burying their dead with flowers (although the flowers are now thought to be a modern contaminant), and that they took care of injured individuals.

Shanidar I, an elderly Neanderthal male known as Shanidar I, or ‘Nandy’ to its excavators, was aged between 40-50 years, which was considerably old for a Neanderthal, equivalent to eighty years old today, displaying severe signs of deformity.

He was one of four reasonably complete skeletons from the cave that displayed trauma-related abnormalities, which in his case would have been debilitating to the point of making day-to-day life painful.

At some point in his life, he had suffered a violent blow to the left side of his face, creating a crushing fracture to his left orbit that would have left Nandy partially or completely blind in one eye.

He also suffered from a withered right arm which had been fractured in several places and healed, but which caused the loss of his lower arm and hand.

This is thought to be either congenital, a result of childhood disease and trauma or due to an amputation later in his life.

The arm had healed but the injury may have caused some paralysis down his right side, leading to deformities in his lower legs and foot and would have resulted in him walking with a pronounced, painful limp.

All these injuries were acquired long before death, showing extensive healing and this has been used to infer that Neanderthals looked after the sick and aged, denoting implicit group concern.

Shanidar I is not the only Neanderthal at this site, or in the entire archaeological record, which displays both trauma and healing.

The bow and arrow, which allows hunters to attack animals from a secure distance, is, according to some indirect evidence, invented during this period.

Bone arrow points dating to sixty-one thousand years ago have been found at Sibudu Cave in South Africa.

Collections of bear bones at several widely dispersed sites suggest that Neanderthals may have worshiped cave bears, especially at Drachenloch above Vättis, in Switzerland, where a stone chest was discovered with a number of bear skulls stacked upon it.

Neanderthals, who also inhabited the entrance of the cave, are believed to have built it.

A massive stone slab covered the top of the structure.

At the cave entrance, seven bear skulls were arranged with their muzzles facing the cave entrance, while deeper in the cave, a further six bear skulls were lodged in niches along the wall.

Next to these remains were bundles of limb bones belonging to different bears.