A living, evidence-based map of our hominin origins

There's something genuinely humbling about realising how directly connected we are to all the hominins that came before us. Not just as a vague evolutionary chain, but as overlapping populations that met, mixed, had children together, and left traces of themselves in our DNA. Neanderthals are still in us. So are the Denisovans. That's not a metaphor — it's measurable. And that's what drew me into this subject.

Over the past few months, I've been digging into the story of human origins — trying to stay as close as possible to actual scientific papers rather than YouTube videos or oversimplified timelines. The deeper you go, the more interesting and messier things get. Dates shift. Research teams disagree. And some of the most widely shared "facts" online simply don't hold up.

I'll be honest about how this was built. The data was collected through AI-assisted deep search across recent research papers — not a manual literature review, but structured queries into primary sources and journal references. The web app itself was also generated by an AI, from a spec I wrote describing what I needed. My role was to ask the right questions, challenge the outputs, and decide what was solid enough to keep.

The repo is here:
https://github.com/fdepierre/hominines-origins

It covers chronological markers, morphology and pigmentation for each hominin group, each entry with a confidence level and a DOI. Everything lives in a single self-contained HTML file, published at:
https://ho.lookingforanswers.eu/

The app is fully autonomous. Use it online, or just download the HTML file and open it locally — no server, no dependencies, nothing to install. Data and interface travel together as one file.

If you spot errors or missing references, feel free to open an issue on GitHub. All contributions are welcome — especially from people who know more than I do, which is most of you.

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