The origin of human beings has been a debated issue in evolutionary biology over the last few decades.

Where did we come from?

Our evolutionary history is written into our genome?. The human genome looks the way it does because of all the genetic changes that have affected our ancestors.

Modern humans (Homo sapiens), the species? that we are, means ‘wise man’ in Latin. Our species is the only surviving species of the genus Homo but where we came from has been a topic of much debate.

A theory says that Modern humans originated in Africa within the past 200,000 years and evolved from their most likely recent common ancestor, Homo erectus, which means ‘upright man’ in Latin. Homo erectus is an extinct species of human that lived between 1.9 million and 135,000 years ago.

Historically, two key models have been put forward to explain the evolution? of Homo sapiens. These are the ‘out of Africa’ model and the ‘multi-regional’ model. The ‘out of Africa’ model is currently the most widely accepted model. It proposes that Homo sapiens evolved in Africa before migrating across the world.

Origin of modern humanity is a debatable issue but what is not debatable among scholars, anthropologists and sociologists is the various stages of human development that we can understand through historic and prehistoric periods.

History is the study of the past starting from the time period when the writing system was introduced and written records were maintained. Prehistory is the study of the past, even before writing was invented and written records were maintained. To deal with the massive spans of time in this period, archaeologists traditionally divide prehistory into three main periods: the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages, named after the main technologies used at that time.