Short answers, pulled from the story.
Anatomically modern Homo sapiens emerged in Africa approximately 300,000 years ago, likely derived from Homo heidelbergensis or a related lineage. A 2019 study based on 260 CT scans suggested modern humans arose between 260,000 and 350,000 years ago through a merging of populations in East and South Africa.
Human DNA is approximately 98.4% identical to that of chimpanzees when comparing single nucleotide polymorphisms. Molecular evidence suggests that between 8 and 4 million years ago, first the gorillas and then the chimpanzees of the genus Pan split from the line leading to humans.
Lucy is the most complete fossil member of Australopithecus afarensis, found in 1974 by Donald Johanson near Hadar in the Afar Triangle of northern Ethiopia. Although she had a small brain, her pelvis and leg bones were almost identical in function to those of modern humans, showing these hominins walked erect. She was nicknamed after the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, played in the camp during the excavations.
Yes, a 2010 sequencing of the Neanderthal genome showed interbreeding with anatomically modern humans around 45,000 to 80,000 years ago. All modern non-African humans carry about 1% to 4% of their DNA from Neanderthals, and a 40,000-year-old skeleton from Romania had a genome that was 11% Neanderthal.
Homo floresiensis, nicknamed the hobbit, lived from approximately 190,000 to 50,000 years before present on the Indonesian island of Flores, possibly through insular dwarfism. The main find, discovered in 2003, was a woman about 30 years old, estimated at one meter tall with a brain volume of just 380 cubic centimeters, less than a third of the modern human average of 1400.
Bipedalism is the basic adaptation of the hominid and the main cause behind a suite of skeletal changes shared by all bipedal hominids, with the earliest bipeds Sahelanthropus or Orrorin arising some 6 to 7 million years ago. Walking upright reshaped the pelvis into a bowl-like form with a smaller birth canal, which limited brain size and led to a shorter gestation period and unusually immature human infants.