LONG BEFORE
An African lakeshore with distant early-human silhouettes

You arrived very late

Were we always the only humans?

about 300,000 years for Homo sapiens · Africa, then the world · Drawing. Not a photograph.

Generated interpretation. Faces are not portraits of known individuals. Early humans are shown at a distance on purpose.

First look

Were we always the only humans?

Wonder. Then look. This is not a test.

Writing is about 5,200 years old.

Farming is about 12,000 years old.

Our species is about 300,000 years old.

Earth is about 4.54 billion years old.

First look is enough. Keep looking is if you want more.

Branches, not a ladder

Were we always the only humans?

This is a time chart, not a family portrait. Each bar is how long that people are known from fossils. Bars that line up lived at the same time. Later is not better. Survival is not a prize.

You are at this year. Touch a bar to go there.

For tens of thousands of years, more than one kind of human was alive. Neanderthals, Denisovans, Flores people, and we overlapped. Then their bars end. Ours has not, yet.

Scientific visualization of fossil ranges. First and last appearances are models. Ghost lineages exist. This is not a complete census, and it is not a ladder. Smithsonian human origins facts; ages rounded.

  • Australopithecus: about 4.2 million years ago to about 1.9 million years ago. Several species. Not one ancestor in a line.
  • Paranthropus: about 2.7 million years ago to about 1.2 million years ago. A robust cousin. That branch ended.
  • Homo erectus: about 1.9 million years ago to about 110 thousand years ago. Long-lived. Walked far. Not an unfinished us.
  • Neanderthals: about 400 thousand years ago to about 40 thousand years ago. People of ice-age Europe and western Asia.
  • Denisovans: about 300 thousand years ago to about 50 thousand years ago. Known from few bones and from DNA. Range is a model.
  • Flores people: about 100 thousand years ago to about 50 thousand years ago. Homo floresiensis. Small-bodied humans on an island.
  • Homo sapiens: about 300 thousand years ago to now. Us. Still here. One living twig.

Keep looking

How would we know? Open only if you want the evidence.

Keep looking · Not a ladder

Humans are one surviving branch among several hominins. Neanderthals, Denisovans, Homo erectus and others were people of their own times. They were not unfinished versions of us. We were not always the only humans.

Keep looking · Where did history go?

If you zoom out far enough, cities and writing become a thin line at the edge of the story. They did not disappear. The scale changed. Importance is not duration.