How are humans different from our ancestors?
If you’ve ever tried to construct a family tree, you understand how difficult it can be to find information about your ancestors, especially as you dig further and further back through your family history. Imagine, then, the difficulty of piecing together a family tree that stretches back millions of years, long before Homo sapiens ever walked the planet. And yet scientists and archaeologists have learned a remarkable amount about our ancestors from fossils and geological clues unearthed since Darwin developed his theory of evolution. With each discovery, we have a better understanding of how similar, and how different, our ancestors were from us. Among the earliest of those ancestors, known generally as hominids, were members of the genus Australopithecus. Heavy-browed and covered in hair from head to toe, australopithecines bore only a faint resemblance to humans, with females typically standing
