The First Man Never Existed!

The title of this article applies not only to the first human being, but also to the first horse, the first camel, the first evening primrose, the first E. coli bacteria, the first yeast fungus, and the "first" individual of any living thing. There is no "first" of any of them. Evolution is a continuous process and all species are connected to their close and distant cousins through their ancestors, through gradual and very slow changes.

How Evolution Works?

Imagine adding photos of all your ancestors backwards, stacking them up and creating a giant index. Your father's father's father's father's father's father's father's father's father's father's father's father's father's father's father. That would be a huge stack: about twice the length of Mount Everest! It would be a huge stack with you at the top and your fishy ancestors at the bottom.

Let's go backwards in this deck and take a few snapshots from history. 1000 generations ago (about 20,000 years ago) will be just a few centimeters back in the deck. This individual will be a human being: A human living in the Mesolithic Age!

10,000 generations ago, about 200,000 years before today, it will be just 2 steps back. And the individual in this photograph will be a human being, a Paleolithic human being. But it won't look much like the one we know.

75,000 generations ago, 1.5 million years before the present, is no longer human. He is a Homo erectus individual. In fact, it would be technically incorrect to call Homo erectus "not human". All species within the genus Homo are scientifically known as "humans". Homo erectus is known as "upright man", Homo habilis as "skillful man", Homo sapiens as "wise man". The genus name Homo means "human". Therefore, there is not a single human species in the Animal Kingdom, 13-14 different human species are known so far. However, only 1 of them is alive and that is us (Homo sapiens).

Let's go back a few hundred steps further on our journey. Our ancestors 1.5 million generations ago, some 25 million years ago, were species similar to Old World Apes: A Proconsul individual. But the species is still a primate.

Our ancestors 15 million generations ago, or about 75 million years ago, look more like a tree rodent than a monkey. We call this genus Plesiadapis.

So let's jump to our ancestors 120 million generations ago. For that, we would have to travel 12 kilometers across our deck! And yet we would have reached only 160 million years before the present day! The species you will encounter is not a human or a primate. It's a rodent as you know it! The genus Juramaia...

Your 165 millionth great-grandfather lived some 300 million years ago and he wasn't even a mammal! It is an ancient genus of reptile called Hylonomus that evolved even before the dinosaurs!

It is important to point this out here: The family photo index of reptiles also forms a separate line. However, it intersects with ours approximately where this Hylonomus is located. Thus, we understand how branches are formed on the Tree of Evolution: When an ancestral population splits into two or more subgroups, whole new lineages can evolve. So each species has its own photo directory! Just like each individual has his or her own family tree.

185 million generations ago, some 350 million years ago, we reach the fishy ancestors: A Tiktaalik. One of the first fish to move from water to land!

In this case it is necessary to ask: Where did the "first man" live in this index? Where is his photograph? "The First Man Never Lived!

Imagine, for example, that you took photograph number 4632. It's a human... Photo 79,221? A Homo erectus. You cannot take any frame between these two and say, "Hah, this is where our lineage became human!" There is no such point!

Each photo we take from the index will look like their parents and grandchildren. Each generation is of the same species as the individuals before and after it: Homo erectus had parents who were Homo erectus and children who were Homo erectus. Our Tiktaalic ancestors had fishy parents and fishy offspring like themselves. You cannot pinpoint the exact generation in which one species became another species! Because they don't just appear out of nowhere!

It is just like you were once a child, but now you are an adult. At no specific moment can you say, "Oh, okay, now I am an adult." There is no day when you go to bed as a child and wake up as an adult.

The fact that the first human being never lived may at first seem like a paradox. It might make you think that the chain of evolutionary theory has been broken. However, one of the keys to understanding evolution is the fact that species can be born from parents of the same species as themselves, and that small changes in each generation can accumulate to eventually create brand new species.

Evolution is like the succession of very similar frames in a movie. If you look at the individual frames that make up a movie, you may find it hard to see the difference between the frames. But the whole movie flows and can evolve into brand new frames.

Every fossil that geologists find is like a slice of history. It's just one frame of a movie. Often thousands of frames are missing between the two frames that can be found. Our task is to fill in all the gaps between these missing frames, to determine what the whole movie is about based on the frames available.