The dominant image to communicate hominin phylogeny is the ‘tree’. In the aftermath of Ernst Haeckel’s work, an image that had been used in family genealogy became the predominant way of arguing for a certain understanding of the evolution of ‘races’, species, and higher taxa. However, tree building was strongly related to other forms of visualization, such as the scale and the map. Thus, old concepts could be maintained when new icons were introduced, and aspects of the imagery of scales, trees, maps, and even networks might be combined. There is no neat historical development through these forms, all of which were and are being used to depict human evolution and kinship to express diverse views. In this contribution, I look at the history of images of human phylogeny and ask what roles they play: Do such images support or contradict the theories they stand for? Is the tree image the dominant one throughout history? Are there rivaling images, and if so, what difference do they make? Besides the epistemics of visualizations of human phylogeny, is there something like a politics of diagrams of human kinship and evolution? While there is no linear, progressive history such as from scale to tree, I will show how the emergence of an evolutionary framework in the nineteenth century, the integration of the human origins sciences into the modern synthesis, and the ‘molecularization of anthropology’ were associated with shifts in the ways in which hominin and human phylogenies were represented.