Homo erectus walked the Earth for nearly two million years
Upright man was the first human species with a body and stride like ours, the first to leave Africa for Asia and Europe, and the first to handle fire. It persisted for close to two million years, with the last known population surviving in Southeast Asia until roughly 108,000 to 117,000 years ago.
The first fossils were found by Eugène Dubois, a Dutch scientist who joined the colonial army to hunt for a missing link in Java. At Trinil his team recovered a skullcap and molar in 1891 and a thighbone in 1892, which he named Pithecanthropus erectus in 1893. European scientists largely dismissed it as some kind of ape. In the 1930s Franz Weidenreich noticed how closely it resembled Peking Man, then emerging in China, and in 1940 he proposed treating both as forms of one species.
Asian finds fuelled a belief that humanity arose in Asia, and Weidenreich, drawing on older race concepts, argued that regional erectus groups evolved directly into local modern peoples. Charles Darwin had already suggested Africa in his 1871 Descent of Man. Louis Leakey's Olduvai Hominin 9, found in Kenya in 1960, was the first of many African erectus fossils, and by the late 20th century the Out of Africa model, in which all modern humans share one anatomically modern ancestor, became the consensus.
Homo erectus evolved in Africa from Homo habilis, with the two coexisting for about half a million years. It had a heavy brow ridge, a jutting jaw, big teeth and thick bones. Adults stood roughly 141 to 167 cm tall and weighed around 50 kg, and brain size varied widely, from about 546 cc in Georgian fossils to around 1,000 cc in East Asia. It probably grew up quickly, like an ape, without the long childhood needed for language.
The species devised the Acheulean industry of large stone tools, used perhaps for butchery and shaping spears and digging sticks, and it hunted large herbivores on spreading savannas. It is often called the first hunter-gatherer. Fire and caves were probably minor parts of life. Later descendants include Homo heidelbergensis, usually seen as the last shared ancestor of Neanderthals, Denisovans and us.
Source: Homo erectus
