The human being is perhaps the most difficult animal to understand historically given that it is the author of its own mythology which includes its own constituted and privileged place among other animals. According to the historical legends of evolutionary biology, homo sapiens is the last extant human species, derived from various other hominids which emerged as far as 3-6 million years ago (depending on the mythological source). According to the cultural records of human religions, homo sapiens is either a created creature fashioned by a supernatural “Deity” (“God,” “Adonai,” “YHWH,” “Allah,” “The Lord,” “Jehovah,” et al., in monotheistic traditions) or perhaps a descendant of a kind of Ur-Human (in highly incestuous polytheistic genealogies). In some cultural traditions, homo sapiens is nothing but a kind of dreamt illusion among the infinitely unknowable eternal nothingness (see Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, Gary Snyder). Today’s most fashionable mythologies hold that homo sapiens is part of a grand “design” or “system” that will soon be revealed through the wonders of neuroscience and computer graphics (see Richard Dawkins, Ray Kurzweil, Wikipedia, et al.). Much more accurate theories include Michel Foucault’s argument that humans were of recent creation and will eventually disappear, a theory which can be measured empirically by recent developments in so-called “evolution,” the American presidential election of 2016 being an acute example. An excellent documentary on the development of human evolution was made in 1999 by the renowned British human scientist Norman Quentin Cook (a.k.a. Fatboy Slim):
Scientific reconstruction of “Lucy” skeleton (Australopithecus)