Homo sapiens appears
Our own species emerges in Africa
Quick facts
- Homo sapiens
- About 300,000 years ago
- Where
- Evolved in Africa, now worldwide
- Who belongs to it
- Every living human
- In context
- A very recent arrival on this timeline
What happened
Our own species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa about 300,000 years ago, according to the Smithsonian, and every person alive today belongs to it. For most of that time our ancestors lived across Africa; only much later did they spread out to populate the rest of the planet, until the species that started on one continent now lives worldwide. We are, in the long view of this timeline, a very young kind of animal.
Why it matters
This is the arrival of us. Every war, invention, migration, religion, and work of art on the human timelines the site holds was made by members of this one recent species, in the last sliver of the 13.8 billion years above. Everything people usually mean by history happens after this line.
How we know
The Smithsonian Human Origins Program gives the age of Homo sapiens as about 300,000 years ago, states that the species evolved in Africa and now lives worldwide, and identifies it as the species to which all living people belong.
Sources
- Smithsonian Institution. Homo sapiens (Smithsonian Human Origins Program) (2024) · Reputable sourcehumanorigins.si.edu · The domain "humanorigins.si.edu" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Hublin et al.. New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens (Nature, 2017, via PubMed) (2017) · Peer-reviewed (author-declared)pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov · Cited as a "journal" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- Human Evolution → · Zoom in: the discovery that rewrote when our species began