The Human Odyssey

Travel back in time to the Miocene epoch, when Earth was truly a planet of the apes. Explore the intense debate surrounding the emergence of the first hominids in Africa. Discover when our kind started walking upright. Learn how spectacular fossils from the Republic of Georgia have toppled old ideas about when, how and why humans fi nally left the African motherland to colonize the rest of the world. And get inside the minds of our ancestors as they started thinking like us, much earlier than expected, it turns out.

After millions of years of sharing the landscape with multiple hominid forms, Homo sapiens eventually found itself alone, as one article in this compendium recounts. But the roots of our solitude may be shallower than previously thought: the recent and controversial discovery on Flores of miniature human remains suggests that our species coexisted alongside another human type as recently as 13,000 years ago.