The first Human/Primate?

Question

I understand that it takes two individuals to create an offspring. I learned somewhere that the first human/primate was named Lucy. If she was the first, how did she come about? Who or what gave birth to her? I don’t understand how the first something can exist without parents or origin. Please refrain from religious explanation if possible.

Answer 1

Lucy was the first primate discovered.  She came about through evolution.  Evolution is just the process of a species slightly changing over many many years to adapt to its environment.  There were many other primates walking around with Lucy when she died.  She was just the oldest remains of a primate ever found.

Answer 2

You are misunderstanding a crucial bit of evolution theory.

It is not that there was a "first human", who was born from "non-humans". To paraphrase an analogy from Secretsauce (another answerer on Y:A):

The Romans spoke Latin, and modern Italians speak Italian. So the modern language of Italian evolved from the older one of Latin. But there was never one person born who suddenly spoke Italian, while everybody else was still speaking Latin. There were many, small changes each generation which eventually added-up to a recogniseably new language. But every single generation would still be able to converse with their parents and grandparents.

It is the same for evolution. Each generation can interbreed with itself, as well as with its parents' generation, and even its grandparents' generation. But there will be small-scale changes which accumulate over time and will eventually add-up to a recogniseably new organism.

(And FYI - Lucy was not the "first human". She isn't even a Homo sapiens. The Lucy fossil is an australopithecus, an ancestor species of H. sapiens. The reason she is considered important is because she has many ape-like characteristics, but we know from her knee morphology that she was fully bipedal)

Answer 3

Lucy was not the first; but it was one of the oldest human ancestor recovered. The key point here being "recovered". They could have been thousands of proto-humans living at the same time as Lucy did, and thousands before, and even many more thousands living after, but since those primitive humanoids were rather small, did not bury their dead, most of them would have been eaten by scavengers and their remains scattered making them very hard to find.

Think about it: if Lucy would somehow have been the first and the only one, where are the remains of her kids? See? The fact some of her bones were recovered (and it was not a complete skeleton, by the way) means nothing about how many were alive at that time or after.

Answer 4

hoopstar is right.. except when saying first primate.. teh first primates evolved shortly before the dinosaurs went exstinct.. and resembled modern day bush babies

it's like what came first the chicken or the egg.. from a biological standpoint... the egg.. as the 2 near-chicken parents created what could then be the first 'true' chicken..

2 things, very close to but technically seperate mated and created what could be technically called the first homonoid (genus Homo) technically human..

Answer 5

"Lucy " was not the first human being. The primate called Lucy was a possible early ancestor of humans. One of the first bi-pedal primates.