The Science of Being Human

But evolution is not a process of increasing complexity, nor any other measure of superiority you can find.

Our genus Homo contains just one species at the moment, and that’s us

none of us is an island and we all live out our lives surrounded by other humans.

and to my mind there is nothing more fascinating than the science of being human.

he system was invented back in 1735 by one of the great scientists of the eighteenth century, a Swedish naturalist called Carl Linnaeus

the humble and dull-looking lymphocytes turned out to be at the heart of the system. Not only that, there are three distinct flavours of lymphocyte: the B-cells make antibodies, the T-cells identify foreign agents in our bodies and the natural killer cells seek out and destroy our own cells that have become infected with viruses.

, we see the rise of genuinely distinct early humans from about 800,000 to 400,000 years ago. This is the age of Homo heidelbergensis, a species named after a fossil jaw discovered in 1907 by Daniel Hartmann,

This series of five skulls showed a wide range of features that would appear to point to a number of different species being present, including Homo habilis, Homo erectus and even a couple of less well-known species, such as Homo ergaster and Homo rudolfensis. Yet the skulls were all found in the same place and are all of the same age,

We now know that Homo erectus and Homo habilis were alive at the same time and probably in the same areas.

This species then evolved into Homo erectus