Charles Darwin’s contribution to the history of human evolution is at the centre of the narrative about the evolutionary theory. It is recurrently asserted that from The Descent of Man (1871) onwards, a naturalistic view of the development of human beings became the centrepiece of evolutionary anthropological explanations. In general terms, ‘Darwinism’ is the theory by which human evolution is explained even in the twentieth century and beyond. However, history is always more complex. This chapter aims to provide a broader view of discussions on human evolution in the nineteenth century by drawing on examples of authors and discussions that understood human evolution from perspectives different from Darwin’s. The first point to be discussed will be the case of Darwin himself, above all to rethink what Darwin contributed with his reflections on the human being beyond the continuous presentism surrounding his ideas. A second point will serve to present two other cases that exemplify nineteenth-century discussions on human evolution that have either been ignored or are continually downplayed: Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s poorly analysed approach in Système analytique des connaissances positives de l’homme (1820), and Alfred R. Wallace’s anthropological proposal, developed mainly in the 1860s.