A popular model of evolution concludes that it was incredibly unlikely for humanity to evolve on Earth, and that extraterrestrial intelligence is vanishingly rare. But as experts on the entangled history of life and our planet,

A new study rewrites the story of human evolution, suggesting that intelligent life is not rare but a natural planetary process rather than an improbable event.

Roughly 300,000 years ago, our species first appeared on the African landscape before spreading globally and coming to dominate the planet. All this happened about 4.5 billion years after Earth formed,