For most of human history, the Earth was like the planet of the apes. Indeed, The road to humanity was a long road. It began in Africa some 7 million years ago, when our lineage split from that of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees. Our ancestors still resembled apes nearly 4 million years later.

At least a million years ago, a ghost ancestor walked this planet with a face similar to yours. The modern face, the one with a flat profile in which the nose stands out, appeared at least a million years ago somewhere between eastern Africa and southern Europe.

The key to the statement lies in a bone from the center of the face unearthed in Spain. The bone, a maxilla, belonged to a boy who lived about 900,000 years ago in the area. His face was modern enough to go virtually unnoticed on a crowded street. Body size, height, and shape are also similar to modern humans.

That ghost is the origin of modern humanity. We still don't know who it was because we are talking about a very dark time, a million years ago, with few fossil remains. This ghost with a modern face could have arisen from the African Homo ergaster or even from Eurasian Homo georgicus, who lived in present-day Georgia 1.8 million years ago. At the moment, Homo antecessor fossils are the closest thing we know to the ghost.