Our human ancestors and their relatives in pictures | Science

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Our human ancestors and their relatives – in pictures

A potential new species of human, dubbed the Red Deer Cave people, has been discovered in China, adding another branch to the evolutionary tree of hominids

Wed 14 Mar 2012 17.54 GMT First published on Wed 14 Mar 2012 17.54 GMT

  • Australopithecus afarensis, 'the southern ape', which lived between 3.8 and 2.9 million years ago

  • A sculptor's rendering of A. afarensis in an exhibition at the Houston Museum of Natural Science in Texas. The most complete fossil specimen of the species is 'Lucy', discovered in 1974 at Hadar in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia

  • Dating from around two million years ago, Australopithecus sediba is known from four incomplete skeletons found in South Africa

  • A reconstruction of Australopithecus africanus, which lived between two and three million years ago

  • Homo erectus, 'upright man', which lived from around 1.7 million to 200,000 years ago. The species originated in Africa and spread as far as India, China and Indonesia

  • Homo neanderthalensis – Neanderthal man – which ranged from western Europe to Central Asia for 100,000 years before dying out about 30,000 years ago

  • Homo floresiensis, popularly known as 'the hobbit', a diminutive species of human discovered in Flores, Indonesia – with modern human legs for scale. H. floresiensis lived on the island of Flores in Indonesia between 94,000 and 13,000 years ago

  • An artist's impression of the potential new human species announced on Wednesday, dubbed the Red Deer Cave people

  • The first anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens, appear in Africa about 200,000 years ago
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