How did humans begin?

Answer 1

Every human was born from a pair of parents.

Those parents chose to mate with each other for various reasons (nice features, good job, smart, funny, good dancer, held at gunpoint, etc).

Of course you don't look exactly like your parents and they don't look exactly like theirs. Certain traits increase the odds that someone will survive long enough to reproduce (like being a good hunter/breadwinner or having a more fertile reproductive system or simply being healthy enough to live to reproductive age). Those traits get spread around more and more as beings with them continue to mate throughout the centuries. Thus a population changes gradually over time. To top it off there are mutations. That means when copying the genetic material of your mother and your father a mistake occurred. That mistake may have led to a horrible disease or to a new beneficial trait (like skin that is more resistant to the sun's harmful rays for example). We all have SOME mutations. Most are so minor that they are never even noticed or have no affect on us at all. Over the generations enough of these changes through selection and mutation can develop within a population to lead to massive changes overall. That is why people from a particular geographical area tend to have a specific "look".

Going all the way back through the generations for about 3 million years we could (if we had a big enough family tree) trace the lineage of all humans to a group of hominids living in Africa. Hominids are human-like mammals that are related to both us and the apes. As some of those hominids began to evolve into bigger and more intelligent forms, the older forms died off because they couldn't compete with their larger, smarter cousins.

So, that in a nutshell is how humans began.

Of course life in general can be traced back in the same way because all life on earth is interrelated. To the best of our knowledge the earliest life on Earth would be single celled organisms almost 4 BILLION years ago. Evolution pretty much starts there. There are some theories regarding how those organisms came to be in the first place, and the most likely true one is called "Abiogenesis". But that is a whole other subject (feel free to Google it).

Answer 2

Every human was born from a pair of parents.

Those parents chose to mate with each other for various reasons (nice features, good job, smart, funny, good dancer, held at gunpoint, etc).

Of course you don't look exactly like your parents and they don't look exactly like theirs. Certain traits increase the odds that someone will survive long enough to reproduce (like being a good hunter/breadwinner or having a more fertile reproductive system or simply being healthy enough to live to reproductive age). Those traits get spread around more and more as beings with them continue to mate throughout the centuries. Thus a population changes gradually over time. To top it off there are mutations. That means when copying the genetic material of your mother and your father a mistake occurred. That mistake may have led to a horrible disease or to a new beneficial trait (like skin that is more resistant to the sun's harmful rays for example). We all have SOME mutations. Most are so minor that they are never even noticed or have no affect on us at all. Over the generations enough of these changes through selection and mutation can develop within a population to lead to massive changes overall. That is why people from a particular geographical area tend to have a specific "look".

Going all the way back through the generations for about 3 million years we could (if we had a big enough family tree) trace the lineage of all humans to a group of hominids living in Africa. Hominids are human-like mammals that are related to both us and the apes. As some of those hominids began to evolve into bigger and more intelligent forms, the older forms died off because they couldn't compete with their larger, smarter cousins.

So, that in a nutshell is how humans began.

Of course life in general can be traced back in the same way because all life on earth is interrelated. To the best of our knowledge the earliest life on Earth would be single celled organisms almost 4 BILLION years ago. Evolution pretty much starts there. There are some theories regarding how those organisms came to be in the first place, and the most likely true one is called "Abiogenesis". But that is a whole other subject (feel free to Google it).

Answer 3

Every human was born from a pair of parents.

Those parents chose to mate with each other for various reasons (nice features, good job, smart, funny, good dancer, held at gunpoint, etc).

Of course you don't look exactly like your parents and they don't look exactly like theirs. Certain traits increase the odds that someone will survive long enough to reproduce (like being a good hunter/breadwinner or having a more fertile reproductive system or simply being healthy enough to live to reproductive age). Those traits get spread around more and more as beings with them continue to mate throughout the centuries. Thus a population changes gradually over time. To top it off there are mutations. That means when copying the genetic material of your mother and your father a mistake occurred. That mistake may have led to a horrible disease or to a new beneficial trait (like skin that is more resistant to the sun's harmful rays for example). We all have SOME mutations. Most are so minor that they are never even noticed or have no affect on us at all. Over the generations enough of these changes through selection and mutation can develop within a population to lead to massive changes overall. That is why people from a particular geographical area tend to have a specific "look".

Going all the way back through the generations for about 3 million years we could (if we had a big enough family tree) trace the lineage of all humans to a group of hominids living in Africa. Hominids are human-like mammals that are related to both us and the apes. As some of those hominids began to evolve into bigger and more intelligent forms, the older forms died off because they couldn't compete with their larger, smarter cousins.

So, that in a nutshell is how humans began.

Of course life in general can be traced back in the same way because all life on earth is interrelated. To the best of our knowledge the earliest life on Earth would be single celled organisms almost 4 BILLION years ago. Evolution pretty much starts there. There are some theories regarding how those organisms came to be in the first place, and the most likely true one is called "Abiogenesis". But that is a whole other subject (feel free to Google it).

Answer 4

Humans evolved from a common ancestor shared with other primates approximately 6-7 million years ago. Over time, our ancestors underwent various physical and behavioral adaptations that eventually led to the development of the modern human species, Homo sapiens, around 300,000 years ago.