We all know the biblical myth of the first humans, Adam and Eve. All the peoples of the world have many others, their own creation myths. Not only that, some tribes had myths about the origin of only that particular tribe - as if other captivities didn't count!
However, let's ask ourselves a question - who
was the first human? - And let's take a look at the real, scientific answer. Who was the first man really?
It may surprise you, but the first human being... there never was. Just like there was no first
dog,
cat, butterfly, etc. Because each of them must have parents, and those parents must belong to the same biological species. Just like his grandparents, great-grandparents and even great-great-grandparents. Let's conduct a
thought experiment.
A thought experiment is an experiment that can only be done in your imagination, but by doing it, you can learn something important.
Take a picture of yourself. Now take a picture of your parent and put it on top. Then put a picture of his parent, your grandmother or grandfather on top. Then put a picture of your parent's grandfather or grandmother, your great-grandfather or great-grandmother, in there. And so keep stacking the photos, moving backwards through more and more great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. It would take approximately 185 million photos to complete our experiment. Yes, yes, that's right.
But what would your earliest ancestor have been? A caveman in a leopard skin? A monkey? Forget such thoughts. No one knows exactly what he looked like, but fossils help give a pretty accurate picture. Your great-grandfather in the 185 millionth generation would have looked more like...a latimeria. Exactly, your great-grandfather and great-grandmother in the 185 millionth generation were fish. And if they couldn't mate, you wouldn't be here either.
If you put our photos on a shelf, you will find a man on one side and a fish on the other. And many, many other interesting great-great-grandparents in between, among which you can find different animals, such as monkeys, primates, shrews and many others. All are similar to their neighbors in the row, but if you pick pictures that are far apart, they are quite different. How can this be?
It's actually simple. We are used to gradual changes that step by step form big changes. For example, growing up is so gradual that there is no day when you can say, "He stopped being a child and became a teenager".
So everything was very gradual - so gradual that if you went back a thousand, or even ten thousand years you would not notice any big changes. But your great-grandfather in the 50,000th generation is already very different from you, because he was a different species - a straight man. Man upright and man of sense probably couldn't have shared children. And there's never been a straight man who suddenly gave birth to a man of sense.
So, the question of who the first man was and when he lived has no definite answer. Neither does the answer to the question, "at what point does an infant become a toddler?". Probably less than a million years ago, but more than a hundred thousand years ago, our ancestors were different enough from us that modern humans could have shared children with them if they had met.