Welcome to watch Mojo.

And today we're counting down our picks for the top 10 human ancestors.

Lucy became an almost instant celebrity and anthropological circles.

It was instantly controversial, and it's still controversial to some people today.

It's a bit of a mess, he said.

Directors, you're you're kidding, right?

No, you really said it for this list.

We're looking at our relatives in the evolutionary tree, whom we may have descended from or interbreed with.

So an isolated branch like Homo Florencia answers.

For example, thes so called hobbit people of Indonesia is out, no matter how great their nickname will be, ranking roughly in chronological order, although we will also take genetic admixture into account.

Which of these would you most like to travel back in time to meet?

Let us know in the comments.

Number 10 Nikolay Pit Focus Nakayama.

About 14 million years ago, the ancestral lines of the great apes began to split off from our own.

The great grand folks of orangutan's than gorillas and later chimpanzees all struck out on different evolutionary paths.

Nikolay Piturca's Nakayama is the last known common ancestor of gorillas, chimps and humans living 10 million years ago in East Africa.

It was a large ape somewhere around the size of a female gorilla.

The discovery in 2005 of its jawbone and teeth in Kenya supports the view that our evolution took place holy in Africa rather than moving to Europe and back, as had been speculated before.

We're not descended from them where cousins off them.

So we and they go back to a common ancestor.

There, the chimpanzees, there's us.

We go back to a common ancestor, number nine Suhel Anthropocene should insist This is my story on the beginning of yours.

Experts aren't sure when exactly chimpanzee and human ancestors diverged.

But the discoverers of South Philanthropist cadence is a species that lived seven million years ago in Central Africa.

Believe it to be a transitional species from around the time the chimpanzee lineage branched off.

And, yeah, the name is kind of a mouthful.

Um, but this is a really important species.

It was first discovered in 2000 and one, um, in the Central African country of Chad and so far in the last 19 years, we haven't discovered anything older that is likely to be classified as a moment.

So far, the fossil evidence consists mainly of one small, distorted cranium, and the details are debated That may be close to the reality, but we don't know because we don't know about his hair, his eyes or his nose.

Was it our boreal or bipedal?

Did it come before or after the split, or was it an offshoot of another line entirely?

Experts disagree, but the skull does seem to combine both ape like and human like characteristics.

Number eight Ardipithecus ramidus Some four million years ago, our curious great grand folks climbed down from the trees toe poke about on the ground.

This species is best known from a partial female skeleton that got a lot of buzz in 2000 and nine.

She was nickname Artie.

Artie was small, just under 1.2 m tall and based on the fossils of animals found around her, she lived in a wooded environment, and her skeleton told a surprising story.

Their forests were dwindling as the climate became cooler and drier.

Ah, few scientists think that supernovae also played a role with radiation, triggering lightning storms and forest fires that created more grasslands.

Fossil remains of Ardipithecus ramidus, unearthed in Ethiopia and dated to 4.4 million years ago, seemed to show the transition towards bipedal ism inaction.

Ardipithecus takes us pretty far back toward that branch and informs us that the node point the junction, the last common ancestor, was neither human nor a chimpanzee.

It was something entirely different.

The species had a big toe ideal for grasping branches, but also a pelvic structure that may have allowed them toe walk on two legs.

We go down to the pelvis.

We see the same thing adaptations to two legged walking, but also some primitive characteristics that seem to indicate climbing.

And we can see that best in the nearly intact foot.

According to some researchers, it's smaller.

Canine teeth might suggest a reduction in aggression, foundational for cooperative social behavior.

Number seven Australopithecus afarensis Meet Lucy, one of the most famous fossils in history.

When you look at it as a whole, there's an amalgam of more primitive and mawr derived features that had not been seen before.

In 1974 researchers found her three million year old partial skeleton in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia.

To celebrate, they played the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky With diamonds inspiring her name, Lucy became an almost instant celebrity and anthropological circles.

She didn't look like anything we had ever found before.

She was something very different, and because of that, she opened up for us in an entire new chapter on human origins.

Lucy had long arms, a small brain and a protruding jaw, but her pelvis was remarkably human, showing she could walk upright.

Lucy's legs formed an angle.

Her knees were close together, just like our own knees.

This'll positions the feet directly underneath the body, making walking easier and more efficient.

It's thought that others of her species left remarkably well preserved footprints at Laetoli, Tanzania, as they tracked through the muddy ash left by volcanic eruptions.

Number six Australopithecus Africanus, Lucy's younger cousin, Australopithecus Africanus, holds a special place in archaeological history.

In 1924 Quarrymen stumbled over its fossilized remains in South Africa, catching the attention of Australian anthropologist Raymond Dart.

Darts claim that the fossil was the so called missing link between men and apes set him against many of his peers who thought modern man must have jolly welcome from Europe and not Africa.

It took decades, but Dart was eventually vindicated.

Modern analysis reveals that the fossil, which became known as the Taung child, may have been killed by ah hungry Eagle.

Ancient times were rough today, millions of years after the small hominid child met his end.

It's amazing.

Fossil continues to play a crucial role in our understanding of human evolution.

Number five.

Homo habilis.

As the climate continued to cool and dry out 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors faced new challenges.

Grasslands replaced forests, and old food sources became scarce.

Around this time, Homo habilis, the earliest known archaic human, began strolling around the Savannah, meaning handyman.

Its name refers to the use of stone tools, possibly to butcher animals.

The increased meat consumption may have driven other changes in our evolution.

It'll take more research to figure out what exactly is going on here, but that's part of what makes paleoanthropology so interesting.

New discoveries are made all the time.

Homo habilis had a flatter face and larger brain than Australopithecus, although some scholars argue the line between them gets pretty blurry.

It was argued very strongly to be a contender for early Homo Andi.

It was instantly controversial, and it's still controversial to some people today.

It's a bit of a mess, but its emergence marked a huge step towards the evolution of modern humans.

Number four Homo erectus, he said.

Direct us.

You're kidding, right?

No, you really send it.

Soon a taller and more slender species was also strolling the Savannah Homo erectus, also known as Upright Man.

Homo erectus, is the earliest hominid believed to have mastered fire and to have cooked food, allowing a dramatic improvement in our ancestors diets.

It's commonly thought that Homo erectus originated in Africa two million years ago, then spread out through Eurasia.

Although Homo erectus has also been found in Africa and Europe, anthropologists have fiercely debated for almost a century where these early Asians came from and whether they belong on our modern family tree.

However, an origin in Asia has also been argued.

Another point of contention is its relationship to Homo or gaster, which some consider a separate species, and others African Homo erectus.

Regardless, it's pretty humbling to think that Homo erectus survived for over two million years, making our own 300,000 year history seem like the blink of an eye.

Hi, fire number three Homo Heidelberg insists.

We owe a lot to Homo, Heidelberg insists.

If Homo erectus is our slightly eccentric grandfather, Homo Heidelberg, Insys is closer to a familiar father figure.

They lived roughly 500,000 years ago, Um, in the middle of the place to seen.

They are found all over in three different continents.

There's examples of them in Europe, and that's primarily where they're found.

While it's thought that Homo Heidelberg ANZUS descended from African Homo erectus, their time on earth overlapped for several millennia.

Arriving on the scene 6 to 700,000 years ago, Homo Heidelberg Antzas looked a lot like us.

With a large brain and similar stature.

They also built permanent shelters.

Some fanned out throughout Europe and eventually evolved into Neanderthals.

A few ready travelers branched out into Asia, evolving into Dennis Evans.

Meanwhile, back in Africa, there emerged a new species, possibly from Homo Heidelberg, Insys, homo SAPIENs.

Have you ever seen a homo SAPIEN?

You don't know?

Want to know?

Yeah.

I saw one once at the zoo.

Describe it.

Curry?

Yep.

Big gorilla looking.

He was picking his watch.

Odili he waas?

Yeah.

Okay.

Number two.

Denise Evans.

We don't know much about the denisovans Neanderthals, Eastern cousins.

The only fossils we have are a few bones and teeth.

This was the first time that we identified a new form of extinct human just from a genome sequence and hardly any information at all from bones a stone tools.

But thanks to DNA analysis, we do know this.

Our ancestors had a pretty crazy sex life, and we don't mean with each other.

We mean with other species of humans.

Dennis Evans branched off from Neanderthals, but also did the dirty with, um, with us and at least one other species, possibly homo erectus.

Their DNA tells scientists that the Denise Evans may have roamed all across Asia and based on genetic differences between the different fossils from Denise of a cave, scientists think that two of the individuals live roughly 65,000 years apart.

In fact, today's Melanesian is, and Australian Aboriginals still carry traces of their DNA, and Tibetans might owe a gene that allows them to live at high altitudes to the same source.

This indicates that Denis O Bins and their descendants may have had, ah, greater geographic area than previously thought.

Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest videos.

You have the option to be notified for occasional videos or all of them.

If you're on your phone, make sure you go into your settings and switch on notifications.

Number one Neanderthals, knee and itself a species of human in many ways so similar to us, and you're also very different life for our ancestors could certainly be nasty, brutish and short.

How did they cope in a world where nature was unpredictable and death?

Sudden archaeological evidence suggests that Neanderthals might have been the first humans to bury their dead and may have even held funerals.

It's hard to say if this means Neanderthals had spiritually beliefs, but we do know they were much more sophisticated than once thought.

Using fire, advanced stone tools and possibly language, Neanderthals may have even painted cave art in Spain stockier, stronger and bigger brains than us.

They nonetheless vanished about 40,000 years ago, soon after modern humans reached Europe.

Some scientists believe the Neanderthals were killed or out competed by modern humans or Homo SAPIENs who arrived in Europe at around the same time as the Neanderthals.

Extinction.

But thanks to interbreeding, Neanderthal DNA lives on, carried in the genomes of Homo SAPIENs today, do you agree with our picks?

Check out this other recent clip from Watch Mojo and be sure to subscribe and ring the bell to be notified about our latest videos.