All people today are classified as Homo sapiens. Our species of humans first began to evolve nearly 200,000 years ago in association with technologies not unlike those of the early Neandertals.It is now clear that early Homo sapiens, or modern humans, did not come after the Neandertals but were their contemporaries.t would be a mistake to assume that from the time modern Homo sapiens began migrating out of Africa that all people in that continent were modern humans. The video below presents evidence of pockets of archaic humans surviving in West Africa until at least 13,000 years ago.