How long have humans been on Earth?

Question

I've heard about 6,000 years, but I thought it was more than that... Maybe I'm mixed up...

Answer 1

modern human.. homo sapiens sapiens has been around about 100,000 years.. 'humans' in the sense of hominoids.. are about 2.2 million years old

Answer 2

I'm sure it's more than 6000 yrs, but I figure only the LORD knows for sure!!!

Answer 3

Between 100,000 to 200,000 years.  The main question is not the dating of fossils, but defining what is "human" ... i.e., at what point would H. erectus be more correctly called H. sapiens, as these are just arbitrary distinctions defined by anthropologists.

The evidence includes the rapid expansion of cranial capacity in fossils dated in the Mid to Late Pleistocene epoch (about 250,000 years ago), and the arrival of stone tools. I don't know where people get the idea that the dating of these fossils is done with carbon dating ... C14 has a very short half-life making carbon dating accurate only to about 60,000 years (which is a lot longer than 6,000 years, but not nearly long enough to date most fossils), and can only be used on once-living carbon-based material, which does not include stone tools and fossils. Instead, this dating of fossils and stone tools is done with other forms of radiometric dating (e.g. Potassium-Argon), fluorine-absorption dating, seriation, stratigraphy, etc.

And incidentally, we have found mummified human remains as old as 9,500 years, and cave paintings older than 35,000 years.

Answer 4

**** THE LORD HAIL SATAN 666 but yea humans have been living here for way more than 6k years, look at how advanced we are, there's no way all that could have happened within 6k years, it would have taken millions and millions of years to be as fine tuned as we are now, but I suppose the human beings as we are today could have been developed around 6 thousand years ago

Answer 5

Right about a half an hour... as of... NOW.

"The surviving physical evidence, from skulls such as these, suggests that the transition from Homo erectus to Homo sapiens, the earliest forms of our own species, occurred approximately 300,000 to 400,000 years ago."

Substantially longer than 6,000 years, without question.

Answer 6

What race were Adam and Eve? Wow, 6000 years, THAT'S A LOT!!!

OK, now I'm talking serious, you should have posted this question in "religion", not in "biology". YOU CAN'T MIX RELIGION AND SCIENCE.