ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the evolutionary history of the human species over the past few hundred thousand years. At the time of the initial publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, very little was known about the fossil record of human evolution. Anatomically modern humans begin to appear in the fossil record first in Africa around 130,000 years ago and then later throughout the rest of the Old World. Some anthropologists see the fossil record of Homo over most of the past 2 million years as representing the evolution of a single species over time. Most evolutionary biologists use logical species concept, idea that two populations belong to the same species if they naturally interbreed and produce c. Differing interpretations of the number of past human species spring from debate over the origin of modern humans. The difference between the birth of a new species and change within a species is fundamentally crucial in evolutionary terms.
