Hello, some people think that only the place where hominid fossils have been found can be called the birthplace of human ancestors. At present, several hominid fossils have been found, all in Africa. In this sense, the hometown of mankind is still in Africa. However, the discovery of Shu ape fossils has raised a possibility for us: Maybe one day, people will find more traces left by our distant ancestors in China, so that we can more clearly infer what happened in Chinese mainland millions or even tens of millions of years ago. The process of discovery is also a process of exploration, and it is a long road full of hardships. But compared with millions of years of human evolution, this process is very short. How did human beings originate? Simply put, the origin of mankind is the historical origin of mankind, that is, where and how people came from. Archaeological findings prove that human beings evolved from ancient apes, or, more accurately, an independent evolutionary branch differentiated from the ape system. Therefore, to study the origin of human beings is to trace back when, where and how the human branch differentiated from the ape system and how it evolved into modern people. This problem mainly involves the theory of human origin (1); (2) the transitional stage; (3) Walking upright on two feet; (4) using and manufacturing tools, etc. The following mainly talks about the theory of human origin. /kloc-in the 8th century, when C.von Linnaeus classified animals, he classified humans, apes and monkeys into one class, which means they are all sensitive higher animals. 1809 J.-B. De Lamarck proposed that human beings evolved from apes, but the evidence is not sufficient. Half a century later (1859), C.R. Darwin published The Origin of Species. At the end of the book, he hinted that human beings originated from animals. Inspired by Darwin, Huxley studied the origin of human beings from the perspective of evolution. 1863 published "Man's Position in Nature", proposing that human beings and apes are descended from the same ancestor, which is the "Homology of Apes". 1868 E. haeckel further demonstrated the theory of consanguinity of apes with facts in his book History of Natural Creation. 187 1 year, Darwin published "The Origin and Sexual Selection of Human Beings", which proved with a lot of facts that human beings do not exist forever, nor are they "the products of individual creation". Humans are also the products of evolution, and evolved from ancient apes through variation, heredity and natural selection. And when the level of scientific development at that time allowed, a series of questions about the origin of human beings were discussed. 1876, Engels wrote the article "The Role of Labor in the Transformation from Ape to Man", emphasizing the significance of labor to man: "It is the first basic condition of the whole human life, and it has reached such a level that we have to say in a sense:' Labor creates man himself'." (Selected Works of Marx and Engels, Volume III, page 508) During the following 100 years, the discoveries of paleoanthropology and paleolithic archaeology provided a lot of physical evidence about human evolution, which greatly promoted the understanding of human origin and the development of human origin theory. 100 years ago, it was generally believed that human history was only a few thousand years. /kloc-In the second half of the 0/9th century, Neanderthal fossils were found in many places in Europe, which pushed human history forward for more than 65,438+million years. /kloc-from the end of 0/9 to the first third of the 20th century, ancient human fossils were found in Java, Indonesia, and then in Zhoukoudian, China, which pushed human history forward for hundreds of thousands of years. Since 1924, Australopithecus fossils with more primitive morphological characteristics than those of apes have been found in many places in South Africa. After a period of debate, it was established in the 1950s, extending the history of human evolution to 2-3 million years ago. 1965, Simmons and others re-studied the complex forest ape fossils (totaling more than 50 species in 28 genera), and sorted them into two categories: apes and humans. It was considered that Lamarctus, as an early representative of Anthropoceae, should belong to Anthropoceae. Based on the above data, Simmons and Purbe put forward a set of theories about the origin of human beings in the late 1960s, arguing that humans and apes began to divide in the Miocene of Neogene (18 million to 6 million years ago). At that time, there were obvious differences between human beings and apes, and various members of Apeoidea had obvious ancestor-offspring systematic relationship with various living apes and humans. Among them, several species in the genus Australopithecus are the ancestors of various existing apes, while Lamarck evolved from a forest Australopithecus and was the earliest representative of Anthropoceae (human classification system). Later, Lamarck evolved into Australopithecus 2 million years ago, and then evolved through Homo erectus (Homo erectus), Early Homo sapiens (Neanderthals) and Late Homo sapiens (Krumanon). For a time, this theory had a considerable influence in academic circles. However, in recent years, a series of new important discoveries and further research on existing materials have changed this situation: some people questioned the morphological characteristics of Lamarcinopithecus family of apes, and some people suggested that Lamarcinopithecus and Sivapithecus may be the gender differences of the same species, and they may be the ancestors of existing orangutans; Since 196 1 year, more Miocene hominid superfamily fossils have been found in Kenyan, Greek, Turkish, Hungarian, Pakistani and China, especially in Lufeng, Yunnan, China, where the world's first Lamarckian skull was found. In recent ten years, the results of molecular biology research show that the earliest time for the differentiation between humans and apes is only about 5 million years. In 1970s, primitive Australopithecus Afa was discovered in Letoli, Tanzania and Hada, Ethiopia, 3-4 million years ago. It is the earliest known representative of hominid, and has many unexpected characteristics similar to chimpanzee but different from Raemakers. Therefore, it is considered that the latter may not be a member of hominid, and humans and apes may have begun to differentiate in a later period. Based on the above situation, by the end of 1970s, C. Pulby put forward a new explanation or new concept about the origin of human beings, arguing that members of Miocene ape superfamily were the same ancestors of human beings and apes, and their relationship with modern apes or humans was not as clear as originally thought. It is still uncertain which is the ancestor of human beings and which is the ancestor of some living apes. The evolutionary tree of human beings is neither a ladder nor a simple linear relationship between ancestors and descendants, but a more dispersed and shrubby evolutionary system. Now it seems that the process of human origin is far more complicated than in the past. In fact, human evolution contains very complex and interrelated anatomical, psychological, technical, economic and cultural factors. The study of the origin of human beings should not only clarify the origin of human organisms themselves, but also clarify the origin of human material culture, language and consciousness, and human society, which is still a major issue that paleoanthropology needs to solve. So the theory of human origin is still developing.