[The Conversation Africa] The study of present-day species has delivered a clear verdict on humanity's place in the living world: right alongside chimpanzees and bonobos. However, this does not tell us much about our earliest human representatives, their biology or geographical distribution - in short, how we became human. For this, we mainly have to rely on the morphology of frustratingly rare fossils, given paleogenetic information is only preserved for recent periods - and even then, in rather cool climates.
