When did humans first appear?

The answer depends on what we mean by "humans." If we mean anatomically modern Homo sapiens — individuals who would look essentially like us — the oldest known fossils date to roughly 300,000 years ago. Specimens from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco and Omo Kibish in Ethiopia show the high, rounded skull and reduced brow ridges characteristic of our species.

But looking modern and behaving modern are different things. For the first 200,000+ years of our existence, Homo sapiens lived much like their predecessors — making similar stone tools and leaving little evidence of the symbolic behavior (art, complex language, elaborate burial) that we associate with fully modern humans.

Around 100,000-70,000 years ago, evidence of behavioral modernity begins appearing: ochre pigments used for body decoration, shell beads for jewelry, abstract engravings, and deliberately buried dead. This transformation — sometimes called the Cognitive Revolution — may reflect the development of fully modern language and the capacity for abstract, symbolic thought.

If we expand the question to include the broader human family, the story goes much further back. The genus Homo appeared around 2.8 million years ago with Homo habilis. Homo erectus, our first globe-trotting ancestor, emerged 2 million years ago. The hominin lineage itself — including all species more closely related to us than to chimpanzees — extends back 6-7 million years.