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Being ourselves the subject of our deepest enquires, to the question, what is human?, several viewpoints are in order. Each one has its relevance. A privileged one is paleoanthropology. Throughout its history, this discipline has described the characteristics indispensable to consider human beings as such; it posits the primordial conditions anthropological philosophy ask for, and so construes a historical scenario for that what is human. From Darwin onwards, human characters are: erect posture; language; material culture, and brain development. It is shown here how hominid fossils and their meaning become relevant in the construction of human as a concept. Paleoanthropological analyses allow us to understand and synthesize humans as essentially historical creatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]