This photogallery of fossil hominid skulls provides views of some of the key specimens and morphological changes discussed in the Handbook.
Hominid taxonomy is seemingly in a perpetual state of flux.
Some notes alerting the reader to major classifactory changes are provided in the introductory chapter by Campbell, the editorial appendices to Holloway's chapter, and the epilogue chapter by Peters. Both the stability and the change characteristic of palaeoanthropology over the past few decades are testimony to the field's maturation. In 1871 Charles Darwin was able to propose that we were most probably of African origin and most closely related to the Great Apes of Africa. There are no fossils now believed to lie within our hominid lineage before c. 6.0 m.y.a. The earliest group of well-known undoubted hominid fossils comes from Laetoli in Tanzania, and dates from c. 3.7 m.y.a.