Mindy Weisberger is an editor at Scholastic and a former Live Science channel editor and senior writer. She has reported on general science, covering climate change, paleontology, biology and space.
Modern humans are the sole surviving representatives of the human family tree, but we're the last sentence in an evolutionary story that began approximately 6 million years ago and spawned at least 18 species known collectively as hominins.
To understand how we endured as a species, we must first look at what we have in common with other hominins, said William Harcourt-Smith, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College and the American Museum of Natural History, both based in New York City. Topping that list is bipedalism. Two-legged walking originated in the Ardipithecus group — our earliest human ancestors who lived around 4.4 million years ago — and Australopithecus, which appeared about 2 million years later.
"For quite a long time, you've got Homo and Paranthropus occupying maybe different niches but similar landscapes, and they both do really well," Harcourt-Smith said. But after about 1 million years, Paranthropus was gone, and"Homo hangs on and proliferates, eventually across the world," he said. "Potential factors include environmental change, competition for food and resources between contemporaneous hominin species, and low population densities," she told Live Science in an email.
This may have made Homo species more resilient and adaptable than Paranthropus was, but unraveling what made H. sapiens outlast all other Homo species is trickier. Ancient tools, art and other artifacts suggest that our cognitive powers, technical prowess and problem-solving were more advanced than those of our close relatives, Harcourt-Smith said. Flexible social strategies also could have helped H. sapiens persist where other species perished, Sawchuk suggested.
"While we don't know what role we played in their extinction, it seems likely that our spread out of Africa put stress on other species through competition for resources," Sawchuk said."Our species was very successful at moving around and mating, which is probably one of the reasons we're still here."
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