We use them to help improve our content, personalise it for you and tailor our digital advertising on third-party platforms. Reconstructions of Homo erectus based on fossils from different locations.
There is a lot of variety between individuals, which may be accounted for by the species having existed for so long and over such a wide area. During Beta testing articles may only be saved for seven days. Create a list of articles to read later. You will be able to access your list from any article in Discover. The extinct ancient human Homo erectus is a species of firsts. It was the first of our relatives to have human-like body proportions, with shorter arms and longer legs relative to its torso.
It was also the first known hominin to migrate out of Africa, and possibly the first to cook food. In terms of species survival, Homo erectus is a huge success story. Fossil evidence for H. Compare this to our own species, Homo sapiens , which has been around for perhaps , years so far, and we begin to appreciate their ability to survive over a long period marked by many changes to the environment and climate. Scientists disagree over how H. Reconstruction of Turkana Boy, the approximately 1.
He was only about nine years old and already 1. Although some researchers believe that what we now know as erectus consists of several distinct species including Homo georgicus and Homo ergaster , most accept a broad diagnosis of the species. The earliest fossils that are complete enough to display the anatomical pattern of H.
The conventional view is that the species evolved in Africa about two million years ago. Precisely when - and why - H. Disputed evidence of the very late survival of H. Some methods have dated these to older than , years, others to less than 50, years. The fossils show the characteristic H. Current evidence suggests all hominins before H. However, almost as soon as this species appears in the fossil record there is evidence it expanded out of Africa and into western Asia, then to eastern Asia and Indonesia.
A small skull fragment from East Turkana, Kenya, dates to about 1. But the first fossils were found in Asia, and it is in Asia where this species survived for so long. Cast of skull 5 D - the most complete Homo erectus skull found at Dmanisi, Georgia - on display in the Museum's Human Evolution gallery. The original fossil skull is about 1. The species spread into eastern Asia, including China, where it appears to have been present until at least , years ago.
In southeast Asia, H. The species may have survived more recently in Taiwan, the Philippines and on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, but the evidence isn't conclusive. We don't know whether H. But since the assortment of animal fossils found at Dmanisi closely resembles the forest and grassland fauna of southern Europe from the same time, an early human settlement of that region is at least a possibility. Dispersal of species happens for many reasons but essentially H. For example, sabre-toothed cat remains were found alongside H.
The cats apparently dispersed from Africa. These specialised carnivores lacked the teeth to strip a carcass clean of its meat, so might have provided scavenging opportunities for early humans following them out of Africa. It is likely that the spread of H. Java was intermittently connected to the Southeast Asian mainland, allowing Homo erectus to take up residence there.
The species survived on Java for a very long time, until at least , years ago. Meat was an important part of the diet of H. This, together with their larger body size, may explain the broad geographic range of H.
The species H. It had an upright posture. By studying the remains of the very complete skeleton known as Turkana Boy , scientists have concluded that H. It is the most complete early Homo specimen ever discovered. Individuals were comparable to humans today in terms of body size and shape, although they were more muscular and had much wider hips. The Magazine Shop.
Login Register Stay Curious Subscribe. Planet Earth. Newsletter Sign up for our email newsletter for the latest science news. Sign Up. Already a subscriber? Want more? More From Discover. As it happened, the first truly ancient remains of a hominid—a fossilized skullcap and teeth more than half a million years old—were found in Asia, on the island of Java, in So began a century of discovery notable for spectacular finds, in which the timeline of human prehistory began to take shape and the debate continued over whether Asia or Africa was the human birthplace.
In , the Australian anatomist Raymond Dart, looking through a crate of fossils from a limestone quarry in South Africa, discovered a small skull. The first early hominid from Africa, the Taung child, as it was known, was a juvenile member of Australopithecus africanus , a species that lived one million to two million years ago, though at the time skeptical scientists said the chimpanzee-size braincase was too small for a hominid.
In , archaeologist Louis Leakey and his wife Mary, working in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, discovered a bit of hominid jawbone that would later become known as Paranthropus boisei. The 1. Their work inspired American and European researchers to sweep through the Great Rift Valley, a geologic fault that runs through Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia and exposes rock layers that are millions of years old. But her ankle, knee and pelvis showed that she walked upright like us.
This meant Lucy was a hominid—only humans and our close relatives in the human family habitually walk upright on the ground. A member of the species Australopithecus afarensis , which lived from 3. She confirmed that upright walking evolved long before hominids began using stone tools—about 2.
But her upright posture and gait raised new questions. How long had it taken to evolve the anatomy to balance on two feet? What prompted some ancient ape to stand up and begin walking down the path toward humanness? And what kind of ape was it? But what came before her? For 20 years after her discovery, it was as if the earliest chapter of the human story were missing. Desmond Clark to search for fossils and stone tools in Ethiopia. They got off to a promising start—finding 3.
It was the root of a tooth, a molar, and its size and shape indicated that it belonged to a hominid. State-of-the-art dating methods indicated that they were 4. The idea that it was a member of the human family was based primarily on its teeth—in particular, the absence of large, dagger-like canines sharpened by the lower teeth.
But the gold standard for being a hominid was upright walking. So was A. White joked at the time that he would be delighted with more fossils—in particular, a skull and thighbone.
It was as if he had placed an order. It was the find of a lifetime. Her bones were so brittle that they crumbled when touched. The researchers spent three field seasons digging out entire blocks of sedimentary rock surrounding the fossils, encasing the blocks in plaster and driving them to the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.
In the museum lab, White painstakingly injected glue from syringes into each fragment and then used dental tools and brushes, often under a microscope, to remove the silty clay from the glue-hardened fossils. Meanwhile, Suwa, today a paleoanthropologist at the University of Tokyo, analyzed key fossils with modified CT scanners to see what was inside them and used computer imaging to digitally restore the crushed skull.
Finally, he and anatomist C. Owen Lovejoy worked from the fossils and the computer images to make physical models of the skull and pelvis.
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