From apes to humans. Archaic humans, modern humans, Adams and Eves.

Venus figurines in context.

Part 1-2

So, we split from apes or, more precisely, from the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans.

First, of course, something between man and ape evolved, and then human features began to predominate and so there appeared the first humans, archaic humans. Because we split from African apes, human evolution took place in Africa, and the first archaic humans appeared there about 2.5 million years ago. Evolution continued, and at a certain stage of development, groups of archaic people were moving all over Africa, meeting each other, passing on genes, with their paths diverging again. This went on for several hundred thousand years, and then, roughly 300,000 years ago, anatomically modern humans (AMH) of the species Homo sapiens began to appear in Africa. The emergence of Homo sapiens was complex, and initially modern humans lived for a long time together with other, archaic humans.

Modern humans do not descend from a single branch of archaic humans. Some time ago, rather misleading concepts of mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam emerged. These are misleading terms because they give the impression that all of us humans are descendants of just these two individuals. But that is not the case. Both mitochondrial DNA (mt-DNA) and the Y chromosome make up only small parts of the entire human genetic information (human genome) and, moreover, they evolve and spread differently than most other genes. Mt-DNA is passed down only through the maternal line (mothers pass it on to their offspring, but fathers do not pass it on to their offspring) and the Y chromosome is passed down only from father to son. If we look for the last common ancestor only by mitochondrial DNA and only by the Y chromosome, we come to these two people. But if we were to search for the last common ancestor exploring other genes (and humans have a lot of them), we would find, in each case, a different common ancestor. At the time of mitochondrial Eve and Y-chromosome Adam, there also exited other females and other males, and we inherited genes from them. However, these genes were not genes of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosome. Our genomes indicate that there were a lot of Adams and Eves living over a period of millions of years.

Following part: 1-3 A Brief history of the settlement of Europe and its surroundings.

Previous part: 1-1 Briefly from the Big Bang to the apes.

1.2 Literature

Books:

1.

Tom Higham

The World Before Us. How Science is Revealing a New Story of Our Human Origins

Penguin Books, 2022

2.

Jan Zrzavý, Hynek Burda, David Storch, Sabine Begallová, Stanislav Mihulka

Jak se dělá evoluce. Labyrintem evoluční biologie (in Czech)

Dokořán/Argo, edice ZIP, Praha 2017. Vydání 4., v českém jazyce 2.

3.

Jerry A. Coyne

Faith vs. Fact

Penguin Books, New York, 2016

Articles

1.

Aaron P. Ragsdale, Timothy D. Weaver, Elizabeth G. Atkinson, Eileen G. Hoal, Marlo Möller, Brenna M. Henn, Simon Gravel: 

A weakly structured stem for human origins in Africa. 

Nature, 2023; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-06055-y

2.

Trevor Cousins, Aylwyn Scally, Richard Durbin: 

A structured coalescent model reveals deep ancestral structure shared by all modern humans. Nature Genetics, 2025; DOI: 10.1038/s41588-025-02117-1

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1