The main year and people contributed are:
1868 - Edouard Lartet Henry Christy: French geologist Lartet and English banker Christy unearth several ancient human skeletons in a rock shelter called Cro-Magnon in France. These hominine fossils are the first to be classified as Homo sapiens.
1886 - Marcel de Puydt Max Lohest: De Puydt and Lohest describe two Neanderthal skeletons found in a cave in Belgium. Their detailed descriptionshows that Neanderthals were an extinct human form, not an abnormal form of modern human.
1924 - Raymond Dart: Dart, an Australian anatomist, finds an early hominine fossil—a nearly complete skull of a child—in South Africa. This specimen was placed in a new genus called Australopithecus.
1974 - Donald Johanson: An American paleontologist and his team find 40 percent of a skeleton of Australopithecus, which they call Lucy, in the Afar region of Ethiopia. The skeleton is about 3.2 million years old.
1978 - Mary Leakey: Mary Leakey, a British anthropologist, discovers a set of 3.6 million-year-old fossil hominine footprints at Laetoli in Tanzania. The footprints provide evidence that early hominines walked erect on two legs.
2001 - Meave Leakey: Nature publishes Meave Leakey’s discovery of a 3.5–3.2 million year old skull that may be a human ancestor other than Australopithecus.
2002 - Ahounta Djimdoumalbaye: Djimdoumalbaye, a college student in Chad, discovers the cranium of what may bethe oldest known hominine, Sahelanthropus tchadensis.
2006 - Zeresenay Alemseged: Zeresenay, an Ethiopian paleoanthropologist, announces his discovery of the fossilized skeleton of a young hominine in the Dikika region of Ethiopia. It is the most complete example of A. farensis ever discovered and is about 3.3 million years old.