Our species, Homo sapiens, has been evolving for more than 300,000 years, but the story of human origins starts much earlier. Since evolving from the common ancestor that we share with our closest living relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, there have been many different species along the human lineage — known as hominins.
Scientists who study human origins and evolution, called paleoanthropologists, sometimes find new hominin fossils that give us a glimpse into our evolutionary history. And advances in the analysis of ancient proteins are helping to identify which species a fossil belongs to, and whether they were male or female. We now know there were large periods of time when multiple hominin species shared the landscape, and that sometimes they mated.
