Another misconception is to think of human evolution as a ladder leading directly from an ancestral ape to homo sapiens. This crror is often illustrated as a parade if fossil species that become progressively more like ourelves as they march across the page. If human evolution is a parade, it is a very disorderly one, with many groups breaking away to wander other evolutionary paths. At times, several hominin species coexisted. These species often differed in skull shape, body size, and diet (as inferred from their teeth). Ultimately, all but one lineage-the one that gave rise to homo sapiens-ended in extinction. But when the characteristics of all hominins that lived over the past 6 million years are considered, H. sapiens appears not as the end result of a straight evolutionary path, but rather as the only surviving member of a highly branched evolutionary tree.