1. Introduction

Abstract

All living organisms are situated on a Tree of Life that began around three billion years ago. The Introduction explains that this VSI focuses on the last stage of the human evolutionary journey, the stage between the most recent common ancestor shared by chimpanzees/bonobos and modern humans (around six to eight million years ago) and present-day modern humans. The three objectives of this VSI are to try and explain how palaeoanthropologists go about the task of improving our understanding of human evolutionary history; to convey a sense of what we think we know about human evolutionary history; and to show where the major gaps in our knowledge are.