Who writes this site
Hominin History is written and run by Bennett, a student in North Carolina who built the site after years of visiting fossil halls, tar pits and museums. The full story is on the About page. It is an independent, personal project and is not affiliated with any university, museum or company.
Bennett is an enthusiast, not a credentialed palaeoanthropologist or geneticist. That is exactly why every article leans on the published work of people who are, and why each one lists its sources at the end.
What we publish
- Species profiles for thirteen hominins, from Sahelanthropus to Homo sapiens, each with dates, brain size, key fossils and the open debates.
- Articles that answer a specific question about human evolution, a famous fossil, a site, or a population known from ancient DNA.
- Interactive tools: the deep-time timeline, the migration chapter, the species comparator, the fossil-site map, the Etruscan case study and the 3D molecule viewer.
How articles are researched
- Primary literature first. Factual claims are checked against the original peer-reviewed papers wherever possible, and those papers are listed under “Sources & further reading” at the end of each article. When a press release and the paper it describes disagree, we follow the paper.
- Museum references. Species accounts draw on institutional sources such as the Smithsonian Human Origins Program and the Natural History Museum, London.
- Uncertainty stays visible. Dates and measurements are given as ranges where the evidence is a range. Where researchers genuinely disagree, as over Homo naledi burials or the timing of Neanderthal interbreeding, the article presents the competing positions instead of picking a winner.
- Predictions are labelled as predictions. Traits inferred from a genome, such as skin or eye colour, are described as genetic predictions, not observations.
- Culture, language and ancestry are kept apart. An archaeological culture, a language and a genetic ancestry profile are related but different kinds of evidence, and we try not to treat them as interchangeable labels.
Data and original analysis
The migration chapter, the genome atlas and the ancient-DNA figures in several articles are built from the openly published Allen Ancient DNA Resource (AADR v66.p1), distributed through Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/FFIDCW). Counts quoted in articles, such as the number of individuals carrying a particular label, come from this site’s own processing of that dataset.
Some outputs are exploratory: the population clusters and “candidate connections” on the migration map are computed patterns, and they are presented as hypotheses to test, not as proven migrations. Established findings from genome-wide studies are shown separately and cited.
Images
Reconstruction portraits of extinct hominins are interpretive illustrations, not likenesses of real individuals. Maps and charts captioned “Hominin History figure” or “Hominin History map” were made for this site, usually from the AADR data described above.
Updates and dates
Each article shows the date it was published. When an article is substantially revised, for example because a new study changes the picture, the page is updated and the change is reflected in its date. Small fixes such as typos or broken links do not change the date.
Corrections
Human evolution is a fast-moving field, and mistakes happen. If you spot an error, an outdated claim or a broken source link, please email bennettkuhn@homininhistory.com or use the contact page. A link to the source that shows the problem helps a lot. Correction requests are read first, and confirmed errors are fixed and noted on the page.
Advertising and independence
The site is free to read and may display advertising served by Google AdSense. Ads are kept visually distinct from articles, and advertisers have no say over what is written. See the Privacy Policy for how advertising cookies work and the Terms & Disclaimer for the limits of what this educational site can promise.