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Asked by anon-188267 to Paul, Nadine, Alex on 16 Nov 2018.
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Nadine Mirza answered on 16 Nov 2018:
From a religious stand point the idea has always been Adam.
From a scientific stand point I think they identified the first “official” human back in 2015 from remains found in Ethiopia. They represent the first person from around 2.8 million years ago- the first upright walker after evolving from being restricted to dwelling in trees.
Before the upright walker we had Lucy- 3.2 million year old remains that are a human-like primate and the findings seem to show that Lucy naturally evolved into the upright walker!
You can read more here if you’d like: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-31718336
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Alex Reid answered on 16 Nov 2018: last edited 16 Nov 2018 11:25 am
Hi Brain Cell this is a cool question. Evolution works very slowly over time and the exact point when the first human emerged is probably very imprecise and a hard thing to determine. We have slowly been diverging from a common ancestor from our nearest relatives (chimps and bonobos) for quite some time, around 7 million years or so. Defining at what point the first human emerged is tricky, as it depends where you want to put the cut off! For example, given the slow process it would be weird to call one person a human but their mum not! We sometimes estimate when modern humans first emerged based on evidence of culture, as that is a very important human trait (this was around 20,000 to 40,000 years ago). However, as you can define humans in different ways, and there are lots of different branches (such as neanderthals) which diverge and reemerge with our genetic lineage it can become quite a murky thing to figure out. Nadine’s answers above covers a bit more about our rich inheritance 🙂
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