Question: Who was the first person on earth?

Melissa Ladyman answered on 21 Jun 2016:

To answer this question you have to think about where humans came from in the first place, and how do we define ‘human’.

Humans, like all animals and plants, evolved from very basic life on earth that started billions of years ago. Eventually the species that would become modern humans separated from the primates (the ancestors of gorillas and apes) about 85 million years ago. But it was still millions of years before modern humans evolved. It is unlikely that there was just one original human. We can’t know for certain, but we think that there could have been lots of different species of humans and that some may have lived side by side until only the fittest and strongest remained.

For a long time we could only learn about human evolution through fossils, and that is still the main way we discover new information. Some clever work with DNA is now unlocking more secrets, but we still don’t know exactly how humans came to be the way we are today. That is why it is so exciting to discover new human fossils- it might be the one to help us complete the puzzle.