What do you know about Homosapien ?

However, they also retained many reminders of their tree-dwelling ancestry, especially their rather long arms, short legs, narrow shoulders, and long grasping extremities

Sapiens is derived from the Latin “sapere,” which means “wise.”

All these features would have made them agile upright foragers among tree branches, where they presumably sought food by day and sheltered at night even though they moved on two legs while on the ground.

So essentially, we named ourselves “wise man,” or “thinking man.”

Homo sapiens is Latin and, translated to English, is “wise man”, with “homo” = man and “sapiens” = wise.

The environments in which these early hominins lived suggest that (1) they were still comfortable in the forest and (2) they were largely active at the forest edges and in the woodlands where the forest graded into more open savanna—a type of habitat that was expanding in their African homeland after about 7 mya as climates became drier and more seasonal.

It is difficult to say how the wide variety of early hominins were interrelated. Moreover, although these ancient forms were clearly members of the same larger group, discerning exactly how any of them may have been connected to later species is problematic because of incomplete fossil evidence or different interpretations of the same evidence.

Otherwise, anthropologists now use H. neanderthal and H. sapiens and no longer use H. sapiens sapiens.

Homo may have originated as early as about 2.8 mya, though the record during this time is tantalizingly fragmentary. A variety of incomplete or broken fossils from the period between about 2.5 and 2.0 mya have been placed in the category of “early

Homo,” while slightly later fossils from Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge and elsewhere have been called H. habilis. Taken together, this hominin assemblage makes a rather odd assortment that is based more than anything else on a modest increase in the size of the brain compared with that of Australopithecus and its relatives

Even more important in the assignment of these fossils to Homo may be the occurrence in the same geologic deposits of very primitive stone tools. The notion of “man the toolmaker” was very powerful in the early 1960s when H. habilis was named.

Decades later, the species responsible for producing the first stone tools remains unknown, but it likely was relatively small-brained, with a body proportioned quite differently from that of H. sapiens.

Found near Kenya’s Lake Turkana in a layer of rock dating to approximately 3.3 mya, during the middle of the Pliocene Epoch (5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago), the first tools—primitive hammers, anvils, and cutting tools—predate the emergence of Homo by almost 400,000 years.

Paleontologists speculate that, barring the finding of an as-yet-undiscovered species of Homo, the tools were likely constructed by members of Australopithecus or Kenyanthropus.

Cranial remains dating to slightly less than 2 mya have been discovered at Koobi Fora, Kenya. These are thought to belong to the same species as the remarkably complete 1.6-million-year-old skeleton named “Turkana Boy,” found at nearby Nariokotome.

The nature of the association between the two finds is not yet completely evident, as even partial hominin skeletons are almost vanishingly rare as researchers delve deeper into the past to a time before the introduction of burial practices.

Discovered in 1984, the slender-limbed, long-legged Nariokotome skeleton is the first solid evidence of an individual that resembled H. sapiens in overall bodily form.

Here at last is a representative of a species that was definitely at home on the open savanna, emancipated from the forest and woodland environments to which its predecessors had been confined.

Turkana Boy was 1.6 metres (5 feet 3 inches tall) when he died at age eight, and it is estimated that he would have topped 1.8 metres (6 feet) at maturity. His skeleton bears the basic hallmarks of H. sapiens.

His face, however, was quite projecting, and his brain was little more than half the size of that of H. sapiens. Cranial traits notwithstanding, this individual clearly deserves to be classified with H. sapiens in the genus Homo

However, he is often assigned by authorities to either H. ergaster or H. erectus, the latter of which was originally based on specimens from Java discovered in the 1890s; others include him in an extended interpretation of H. sapiens.

Once modern human body proportions had been achieved, such species could indulge their newfound wanderlust. By about 1.8 mya hominins, previously confined to Africa, had roamed as far afield as China and Indonesia.

In their new territories they diversified, as might be expected, with new species emerging in different regions. H. erectus appeared in the outskirts of Europe (at the Dmanisi site in present-day Georgia) as well as in eastern Asia early on; the next earliest European hominin, H. antecessor, is known only from considerably later, about 800 kya.

Africa appears to have been the source of not just one but successive waves of hominin emigrants, including H. heidelbergensis, which had originated by 600 kya and found its way to Europe by 500 kya. In Europe an early representative of H. heidelbergensis may have given rise to the groups that included the Neanderthals (H. neanderthalensis), who populated Europe and western Asia from about 200 to 30 kya.

Africa, however, apparently continued to produce species that figure more directly in the ancestry of today’s H. sapiens.