Modern humans have willpower and choice. If you compare this modern human behavior, to other phases of human evolution, not all that is cataloged as human, in biology, had will power and choice. The DNA and biology classification of human, which starts over a million years ago . . . .
No. Biologists and anthropologists are slowly coming together in agreement. Only our species,
Homo sapiens, gets the name "human." Recent ancestral species such as
Homo habilis or
H. ergaster may occasionally be honored with the terms "early humans" or "ancestral humans", but this usage is also fading away. They are all
hominids.
Willpower and choice means the brain and consciousness is able to choose apart from the natural human instincts within the DNA.
The presence of willpower and choice is hardly a binary attribute, not "either you've got it or you don't." The other Great Apes consistently display behavior that can only be explained as the result of willpower and choice. For that matter, so do the Lesser Apes (the gibbons) and the older clades of primates (monkeys, etc.). So do many parrots and crows, not to mention dolphins and pinnipeds, ursids and procyonids.
What it really seems to come down to, is that intelligence creates an internal environment in which willpower and choice can
emerge. After all, willpower and choice are, at heart, fancy names for various types of
decision-making. The more intelligence a creature has, the more decisions it can make that are not hard-wired into its instincts.
The DNA is no longer king of the hill, since one can choose to override the natural. This is quite modern and appears to occur at about the time of civilization or about 6000-10,000 years. Before that, the genetic human or as I like to call it the pre-humans, had similar human DNA, but were not the same species, in all practical terms.
Remains of humans who lived more than 10KYA, in the Stone Age, show no difference in DNA from modern humans. After all, that's only a few hundred generations of breeding, which is not nearly long enough to express new traits. Yes, our dogs have mutated enormously during that same period, becoming a new subspecies of wolf with different instincts and nutritional needs, but for them, 10,000 years = 10,000 generations.
Only the modern human, with choice and will power could change the environment to extremes that can even create natural imbalances.
Actually its been recently postulated that the real reason that the twin technologies that comprise agriculture (farming and agriculture) were invented is that our numbers outgrew the food supply provided by nature, so we had to start growing our own.
The problem willpower creates for evolution is, how can the DNA randomly change, in a way that allows the rise of a consciousness, which can then override the DNA with willpower?
Your understanding of both DNA and consciousness is a little wobbly. The roles of the conscious and unconscious are plainly visible in our ancestral species. The invention of the technology of controlled fire, perhaps a million years ago, scared away many predators, allowing people to sleep longer. This extension of REM sleep gave the forebrain more time to catalog the day's experiences and sort them into the midbrain, where they become permanent memories. This was long before
Homo sapiens arose, and the evidence of more clever activity is widespread at that time.
Another REM punch like this occurred shortly before the end of the Paleolithic Era, when the first wolves/dogs were domesticated (or self-domesticated, depending on which anthropologist you listen to). Their nocturnal protection allowed us to sleep even longer, giving those ancestors two periods of REM sleep per night, just as we have. These were true
Homo sapiens, and at this point in our evolution, it's reasonable to call them "modern" in every way.