Homo habilis is a species of the tribe Hominini, during the Gelasian and early Calabrian stages of the Pleistocene period, which lived between roughly 2.8 and 1.5 million years ago.

A team led by scientists Louis and Mary Leakey uncovered the fossilized remains of a unique early human in the 1950s at Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania; these fossils were speculated to be a new species, and called Homo habilis ('handy man'), because they suspected that it was this slightly larger-brained early human that made the thousands of stone tools also found at Olduvai Gorge.

In its appearance and morphology, H. habilis is the least similar to modern humans of all species in the genus Homo (except the equally controversial H. rudolfensis), and its classification as Homo has been the subject of controversial debate since its first proposal in the 1960s.

Classification as Homo

There has been scholarly debate regarding its placement in the genus Homo rather than the genus Australopithecus. The small size and rather primitive attributes have led some experts (Richard Leakey among them) to propose excluding H. habilis from the genus Homo and placing them instead in Australopithecus as Australopithecus habilis.