In her latest book, L'homme préhistorique est aussi une femme, the prehistorian Marylène Patou-Mathis delved right into the clichés and stereotypes about prehistoric women.

This is undoubtedly an encouraging stage for evolutionary biology. Palaeoproteomics has the potential to explore time intervals that were completely inaccessible until now.

Anatomically modern humans represent an evolutionary, biological, and cultural synthesis of our genus. Genetics has helped us to discover and compare a multitude of hybridisations among the populations that lived and coexisted with Homo sapiens out of Africa.

This work reviews the main questions surrounding the evolution of the genus Homo, such as its origin, the problem of variability in Homo erectus and the impact of palaeogenomics.

This article looks briefly at how our current supremely woolly concept of the genus Homo has come about, as background for urging a more rational approach to defining it.

Recent paleoanthropological evidence from the early Pleistocene site of Dmanisi in Georgia has revealed that the first hominins out of Africa were more archaic than the coeval African and Asian Homo erectus.

There was a time when Homo Sapiens coexisted with other species of the same genus such as Homo neanderthalensis or Homo denisova. However all the groups were very small. Today we determine two pieces of evidence: we are now alone as a species (1) and

Human uniqueness Most cosmological views on human origins portray these as being divine, beyond the natural world. This has partly been influenced by our obvious uniqueness. Because, of all past human species –numbering perhaps over a dozen– we are the only ones to have reached historical