Top 10 Remarkable Early Human Relatives
Humans are the only Homos left standing – that is there are no other representatives of the Genus Homo left alive. Some of the other species that were our close relatives, like the Neanderthals, are familiar to most people. Others are lesser known but potentially just as interesting. The more we learn about our related species the more we are learning about what we have lost as Homo sapiens came to dominate the planet.
Neanderthals, or Homo neanderthalensis, were either a sister species to modern humans or a subspecies of Homo sapiens. They emerged around 250,000 years ago and populations continued to live in isolation until about 28,000 years ago. This means that humans and Neanderthals coexisted for a long time. Obviously humans won out and for a long time it was thought that Neanderthals went extinct because they were too primitive to compete. When President Biden commented that anti-mask protests were “Neanderthal thinking” it showe