The short answer: for most of the last two million years there were several kinds of human alive at once. A hundred thousand years ago the planet held at least Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis on Flores, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, and Homo luzonensis was living in the Philippines by about 67,000 years ago. All of them except us were gone by about 40,000 years ago. People with ancestry from outside Africa still carry 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA, and some populations carry Denisovan DNA too. Nobody has one clean answer for why the others disappeared, and there is no evidence that we killed them.
You are the last one. The only surviving species of human, on a planet that used to have at least four at once, and you have never once thought about it. You have been thinking about lunch. So here is what you missed: every other kind of human, and what happened to each of them, counting down. Because that is what it was. A countdown.
How many human species were there?
Go back a hundred thousand years and look around. There is at least Homo sapiens, Homo erectus, Homo floresiensis, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, and possibly more. At least, because the counting is itself an argument. Some scientists are splitters, who see a new species in every odd jawbone. Some are lumpers, who see one species having a bad hair day. So there is no tidy number, and anyone selling you one is selling. Four, five, six: the point is that it was never one. Being alone is the strange part, and you are the strange part.
Source: Smithsonian Human Origins, human species
How long did Homo erectus last?
Homo erectus appeared roughly 1.9 million years ago and lasted until around 110,000 years ago, a run of well over a million and a half years. Our species has been here about 300,000. Erectus lasted more than five times longer than we have managed so far. It walked out of Africa as far as Java, used fire, and made the same basic stone tools for a million years without meaningfully changing the design, which is the single most relatable fact on this page. We are not the successful ones, you self-congratulatory sack of opinions. We are the new ones.
Sources: Smithsonian, Homo erectus; Hublin et al., Nature, 2017, on the 300,000-year-old Jebel Irhoud fossils
Did Homo naledi bury its dead?
Homo naledi lived in what is now South Africa between about 335,000 and 236,000 years ago. It stood roughly five feet tall and had a brain about a third the size of yours, and its bones lie deep in the Rising Star cave system, in chambers you reach by squeezing through on your stomach. The team that excavated it argued that naledi deliberately buried its dead there and may have carved marks into the walls. That claim is genuinely contested. Other teams have published that the evidence does not hold up, and an updated paper in 2025 persuaded one reviewer and not another. The honest answer is that we do not know yet. If it holds, something with a brain a third of yours was doing something with its dead.
Sources: Dirks et al., eLife, 2017, the dates; Martinon-Torres et al., Journal of Human Evolution, 2023, the case against; eLife peer reviews of the 2025 update
When did the hobbit, Homo floresiensis, die out?
On the island of Flores in Indonesia lived a human about three and a half feet tall, with a brain the size of a chimpanzee's. It made stone tools anyway and hunted a dwarf elephant, on an island. The press called it the hobbit, because we are a deeply unserious species. You have probably heard it survived until about 12,000 years ago. That figure was wrong. The dating was redone and published in 2016: its bones are between about 100,000 and 60,000 years old and its stone tools stop around 50,000 years ago. A fact can be corrected and the correction never reaches you. That is not scientists being sneaky. That is you not checking.
Sources: Sutikna et al., Nature, 2016, the revised dates; Smithsonian, Homo floresiensis
What is Homo luzonensis?
In 2019 another one turned up, on a different island: Luzon, in the Philippines. Teeth, foot bones and finger bones from Callao Cave, dated to between about 50,000 and 67,000 years ago. The toe and finger bones are curved, the way you would expect from something that still climbed. Feet that walk, hands that climb, on an island nobody expected early humans to reach. Two separate islands, two separate small human species, neither known when your parents were at school. Which raises the question nobody can answer: how many more are sitting in a cave nobody has opened?
Source: Detroit et al., Nature, 2019
Who were the Denisovans?
We found this species backwards. In 2010, in a cave in Siberia, researchers sequenced the DNA from a fragment of a child's finger bone. It matched neither us nor the Neanderthals. It was an entire population of humans, identified almost entirely from genetics before anybody knew what their faces looked like. For more than a decade the Denisovans were a ghost: we knew they existed, roughly when, and that they got around, and we could not have picked one out of a crowd. A whole kind of person, known by their code and nothing else.
Source: Reich et al., Nature, 2010
Is Dragon Man a Denisovan?
Yes, and recently enough that most people have not caught up. A huge skull found near Harbin in China, hidden down a well for decades before it surfaced and at least 146,000 years old, had been proposed as a new species, Homo longi, and nicknamed Dragon Man. In 2025 researchers scraped hardened plaque, dental calculus, off one of its teeth. Out of it came mitochondrial DNA that matched the Denisovans, and 95 ancient proteins, three of them carrying variants found only in Denisovans. After fifteen years of a species with no face, we finally have one, and it had been in a museum drawer the whole time. The next time somebody tells you science never admits anything new, remind them we found a person's face in tooth grime.
Sources: Science, 2025; Science News
Were Neanderthals stupid?
No, and the insult you have been using your whole life is factually backwards. Neanderthal brains were on average slightly larger than ours. They controlled fire, made specialized tools, used pigment and buried their dead, a claim far better supported than the naledi one, though the details are still argued about. A man from Shanidar Cave in Iraq lived with a withered arm, a crushed eye socket and severe hearing loss. The injuries healed, which means he did not die of them, which means for years somebody fed him. They lived in Europe and western Asia for a couple of hundred thousand years before our species arrived, through ice ages that would remove you from the gene pool inside a weekend. The stooping, grunting brute in your head comes from a 1911 reconstruction of one arthritic old man, and it has been wrong for more than a century.
Sources: Smithsonian, Homo neanderthalensis; Shanidar Cave; La Chapelle-aux-Saints 1, the 1911 reconstruction
Did humans and Neanderthals interbreed?
Yes. The genetics are unambiguous. Around 47,000 years ago, give or take, our species and the Neanderthals had children together, and not once but over a period of several thousand years. This is the part that gets mangled, so be careful with it: it was not one species conquering another. There is no evidence of a war and no evidence of a massacre. What the DNA shows is populations meeting, again and again, over a very long time. The word extinction makes you picture a last stand. Much of this probably looked like nothing happening at all.
Sources: Natural History Museum, London, 2024; UC Berkeley
How much Neanderthal DNA do you have?
If your ancestry is from outside Africa, somewhere between 1 and 2 percent of your DNA is Neanderthal. If your ancestry runs to Papua New Guinea or Aboriginal Australia, you also carry Denisovan DNA, in some populations around 4 to 6 percent. Some of it does things: a Denisovan version of a gene called EPAS1, common in Tibetans, helps with living at high altitude. And before some bargain-bin genius starts building a ranking out of those percentages: no. They are a record of where your ancestors walked and who was standing there. Geography, not merit. Anyone who builds a hierarchy out of a migration map has failed to understand the migration map.
Sources: Neanderthal genetics; Huerta-Sanchez et al., Nature, 2014, on EPAS1
What happened to the other humans?
There is no one clean answer, and the people who give you one are guessing with confidence. What we have is a list of things that were probably all true at once. Their populations were small and scattered. Their genetic diversity was low, a problem that compounds. The climate swung violently, which punishes anything specialized. And some of them did not vanish so much as get absorbed: a small population that keeps interbreeding with a much larger one stops being a separate thing without a single dramatic moment. That is a way of disappearing with no villain in it, which is why you have never heard it. It does not make a good film.
Sources: Nature Education, what happened to the Neanderthals; Neanderthal extinction
Why did Homo sapiens survive?
You want to hear that we were smarter. You are not getting it, because the evidence does not support it. The best candidates are boring, and none of them is about your personal excellence: bigger, better-connected populations, so useful ideas spread instead of dying with whoever had them; broader diets, so a bad season was survivable; longer trade networks; and possibly living in less fragile places when the climate lurched. Not one of those is a quality. They are numbers and addresses. And luck, genuine and unearned. If a few of those swings had gone the other way, a thick-browed gentleman would be reading a page about the strange tall ones who did not make it, and he would be just as smug about it.
The last one standing
Naledi was gone by about 236,000 years ago, erectus by about 110,000. Luzonensis and floresiensis went somewhere around 50,000, the Denisovans in about the same window, and the Neanderthals around 40,000 years ago. And then there was one. For the last 40,000 years this planet has had exactly one kind of human on it, for the first time in more than two million years. That is the anomaly, not the rule. We are the most social animal on the planet, obsessed with each other, and we did all of it as the only ones, with no other kind of mind to compare notes with. You are the last member of a very large family, standing in an empty house, wondering why it feels so quiet. Some of them are still in your blood. That is what you get to keep.
Which of them would you most like to have met? Tell us under the video on Facebook.
Questions people ask
How many human species lived at the same time as us?
At least four others overlapped with Homo sapiens: the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, Homo floresiensis and Homo erectus, with Homo luzonensis and probably Homo naledi as well. The exact count is disputed because scientists disagree about where one species ends and the next begins.
When did the Neanderthals go extinct?
Around 40,000 years ago. Their populations were small and scattered with low genetic diversity, the climate was unstable, and some of them were absorbed into our species through interbreeding. There is no evidence of a war or massacre.
Do humans have Neanderthal DNA?
Yes. People with ancestry from outside Africa carry about 1 to 2 percent Neanderthal DNA, from interbreeding around 47,000 years ago. Some populations, especially in Papua New Guinea and Aboriginal Australia, also carry Denisovan DNA.
Who were the Denisovans?
A human group first identified in 2010 from the DNA of a finger bone in a Siberian cave. In 2025, DNA and proteins from the Harbin skull in China, known as Dragon Man, showed it was Denisovan, giving the group its first face.
Were Neanderthals less intelligent than modern humans?
There is no good evidence for it. Their brains were on average slightly larger than ours, and they controlled fire, made specialized tools, used pigment, buried their dead and cared for injured members of their group.
Sources
Every claim above was sourced before the episode was narrated. Where scientists still disagree, as with the number of species and whether Homo naledi buried its dead, it says so. The main papers:
- Reich et al. (2010). Genetic history of an archaic hominin group from Denisova Cave in Siberia. Nature 468.
- Huerta-Sanchez et al. (2014). Altitude adaptation in Tibetans caused by introgression of Denisovan-like DNA. Nature 512.
- Sutikna et al. (2016). Revised stratigraphy and chronology for Homo floresiensis at Liang Bua in Indonesia. Nature 532.
- Hublin et al. (2017). New fossils from Jebel Irhoud, Morocco and the pan-African origin of Homo sapiens. Nature 546.
- Dirks et al. (2017). The age of Homo naledi and associated sediments in the Rising Star Cave, South Africa. eLife 6.
- Detroit et al. (2019). A new species of Homo from the Late Pleistocene of the Philippines. Nature 568.
- Martinon-Torres et al. (2023). No scientific evidence that Homo naledi buried their dead and produced rock art. Journal of Human Evolution.
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