As recently as 40,000 years ago, as many as 5 ancient human species lived alongside us. Only we survived

We may be the only human species alive today, but just a few hundred thousand years ago there was a remarkable diversity of humans living across the world …

It’s easy to think, given our self-assumed status at the top of the tree of life, that we’re unique …. While we’re certainly ‘special’ by some definitions of the word, we’re not actually that different from several other, now-extinct human species.

In fact, there was a time when our species (Homo sapiens) lived alongside several closely related cousins that, if they were around today, you’d struggle to pick out from a crowd. From roughly 300,000 to 40,000 years ago, these prehistoric peoples lived alongside us, interacted with us, and –  in some cases – even mated with us.

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In many ways, we owe our existence to these extinct human species – without them, we may have remained hiding in the trees like our earlier, chimp-like ancestors and never sought a life beyond the safety of the forests. 

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