• Question: how did the first humans land on earth

    Asked by 542smap44 to Sheila, Piyush, Natalia, Gary, Dimitar on 13 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Gary Munnelly

      Gary Munnelly answered on 13 Nov 2018: last edited 13 Nov 2018 2:00 pm


      Rather than landing on Earth, the first humans would have developed from earlier creatures that lived on the planet before us. This is the process of evolution which takes place over many tens or even hundreds of millions of years. If you go back far enough, it is believed that all life evolved very gradually from tiny micro-organisms that lived in water.

      This theory has led to well known illustrations like this one, which tries to show the gradual evolution of humans:

      Homo sapiens evolution

      Evolution is more like a massive tree, rather than a straight line though, so this image is just supposed to give an idea of the progress of evolution rather than provide an exact map.

    • Photo: Dimitar Shterionov

      Dimitar Shterionov answered on 13 Nov 2018:


      I agree with Gary about evolution.

      However, there is a theory, called panspermia, according to which life on Earth has originated from microorganisms that have arrived from space. This assumes that life exists through the universe and is distributed through meteorites, asteroids, comets, planetoids, space crafts that bring microorganisms, etc.

      If we believe this theory then the first microorganisms, that consecutively gave birth to humans, have landed on Earth 4-3.8 million years ago. In addition there is some support to this theory, given that in this period the young Earth was heavily bombarded by asteroids and meteorites and after that there was an explosion of life on Earth.

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