Paleoanthropology at the Millennium.

In the 140 years since Darwin first presented his paper on evolution by natural selection to the Linnaean Society (1858), a remarkable mass of evidence has been uncovered to document the biological and cultural evolution of the human lineage. This chapter focuses on the archaeology of our earliest ancestors, tracing their emergence as bipedal hominids (members of our family, the Hominidae) more than 4 million years ago, the rise of stone tool-making and tool-using populations by approximately 2.5 million years ago, and the eventual spread of hominids out of Africa into Eurasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]