When did humans first appear?

Anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, our own species, first appeared in Africa around 300,000 years ago, a date pushed back by fossil discoveries in Morocco. That is our species specifically. The broader human story runs much deeper: our genus Homo, which includes earlier human relatives like Homo erectus and Homo habilis, extends back more than 2 million years, and the evolutionary line that split humans from the ancestors we share with chimpanzees, our closest living relatives, diverged roughly 6 to 7 million years ago in Africa. Human evolution was not a neat ladder but a branching bush, with several human species, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, coexisting and even interbreeding with our ancestors, which is why most people today carry a small fraction of Neanderthal DNA.

The perspective that stuns people is how recent everything we call history actually is. If modern humans have existed for about 300,000 years, then written records, civilizations, cities, and everything in history books cover only the last 5,000 or so years, a sliver, less than two percent of our species existence. For the overwhelming majority of human history, our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers with anatomically and mentally modern brains, the same species as us, but left no writing. Agriculture began only about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, and it launched the rapid changes, permanent settlements, cities, writing, states, that produced recorded history. So humans are far older than history, our species predating the pyramids by hundreds of thousands of years, and the entire span of what we usually mean by history is a very thin recent layer atop a vast prehistoric depth. Dates in this field shift as new fossils and genetic evidence emerge, but the broad picture, modern humans a few hundred thousand years old, the genus millions, recorded history just millennia, is well established.