Most anthropologists today agree that Homo sapiens emerged between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago in Africa, based on fossil and genetic evidence.
Fossil evidence: The oldest known fossils attributed to Homo sapiens were found in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco, and are dated to about 300,000 years ago.
Genetic evidence: Mitochondrial DNA (passed through the maternal line) suggests a common ancestor for all living humans lived roughly 150,000 to 200,000 years ago—a woman sometimes called “Mitochondrial Eve,” although she was not the only woman alive at the time, just the one whose line of descent survived unbroken.
These early Homo sapiens were anatomically human, but culturally and behaviorally, they may have been quite different from modern humans. What anthropologists call “behavioral modernity”—symbolic thought, complex language, art, and long-distance trade—seems to have fully appeared only between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago, though that timeline is debated and pushed back as new discoveries arise.
How many of those horses, wolves, even species with hands like lemurs, squirrels, pandas, evolved to sapiens?
Let’s stay with the world as it was around 300,000 to 200,000 years ago—when Homo sapiens emerged—and look at some non-human species that were already walking, flying, or crawling through the Earth alongside them: