What are the features of Homo Erectus?

A growing number of scientists have redefined the species Homo erectus so that it now contains only east Asian fossils.

This history has been recorded directly if imprecisely by many sites that have yielded fossil remains of H. erectus.

Many of the older African fossils formerly known as Homo erectus have now been placed into a separate species, Homo ergaster and this species is considered to be ancestral to Homo erectus.

Homo erectus spanned a large [temporal] and geographic range," said Adam Van Arsdale, an anthropologist at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, explaining the significance of H. erectus. "It is also important because it's the first fossil ancestral to modern humans that, in many ways, shares a lot of its ecology

At other localities, broken animal bones and stone tools have indicated the presence of the species, though there are no traces of the people themselves. H. erectus was a human of medium stature that walked upright. The braincase was low, the forehead was receded, and the nose, jaws, and palate were wide.

The redefined Homo erectus is now generally believed to be a side branch on our family tree whereas Homo ergaster is now viewed as one of our direct ancestors.

In particular, H. erectus had a similar range of body sizes to modern humans, and it is the first human ancestor to have similar limb and torso proportions to those seen in modern humans. This suggests it had adapted to walking on two feet in a more open, grassland environment, rather than swinging from tree branch to branch.

The brain was smaller and the teeth larger than in modern humans. H. erectus appears to have been the first human species to control fire, some 1,000,000 years ago.

There is even debate about whether the two Asian H.erectuspopulations represent the same species. Prior to the 1950s the fossils from Java were known as Pithecanthropus erectus and those from China were called Sinanthropus pekinensis.

Unlike Australopithecus fossils, Homo erectus fossils don't preserve features related to climbing," Van Arsdale told Live Science. And similar to modern humans, H. erectus used tools, technology and culture to hunt for and gather food, he said

The species seems to have flourished until some 200,000 years ago (200 kya) or perhaps later before giving way to other humans including Homo sapiens.

Homo erectus, (Latin: “upright man”) extinct species of the human genus (Homo), perhaps an ancestor of modern humans (Homo sapiens).

For instance, one of the most complete fossil skeletons ever found, a 1.5-million-year-old specimen of an adolescent male known as Turkana Boy (now known as Nariokotome Boy), may have grown up to 6 feet 1 inches (1.85 meters) tall as an adult, though other estimates put his maximum height at the more modest 5 feet 4 inches (1.63 m), according to a 2010 study in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Subsequent discoveries continued to establish a case for this new and separate species of fossil hominin. At first these discoveries were centred largely in Asia.

H. erectus most likely originated in Africa, though Eurasia cannot be ruled out.

By comparison, the iconic 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus skeleton dubbed Lucy was just 3 feet 7 inches (1.1 meters) tall at death, according to a 1988 reconstruction published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

For example, similar fossils were found during the early 20th century at several different locations in Java: Kedung Brubus, Mojokerto (Modjokerto), Sangiran, Ngandong (Solo),

Regardless of where it first evolved, the species seems to have dispersed quickly, starting about 1.9 million years ago (mya) near the middle of the Pleistocene Epoch, moving through the African tropics, Europe, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. This history has been recorded directly if imprecisely by many sites that have yielded fossil remains of H. erectus

Homo erectus also had more variation in height — with more tall and short individuals — than more primitive humans.

Sambungmacan (Sambungmachan), and Ngawi. Another series of finds was made in China beginning in the 1920s, especially in the caves and fissures of Zhoukoudian (Chou-k’ou-tien), near Beijing.

At other localities, broken animal bones and stone tools have indicated the presence of the species, though there are no traces of the people themselves. H. erectus was a human of medium stature that walked upright.

Notably, some H. erectus individuals also had much larger brains than older hominins, according to a 2013 overview of H. erectus that Van Arsdale published in the Nature Education Knowledge Project. Specifically, small-bodied, early H.

Remains found at Zhoukoudian by Davidson Black became popularly known as Peking man; virtually all of these remains were subsequently lost by 1941 during the Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), though casts of them still exist.

The braincase was low, the forehead was receded, and the nose, jaws, and palate were wide. The brain was smaller and the teeth larger than in modern humans.

erectus fossils have brain sizes not much bigger than Australopithecus (an ancestor of the Homo genus), but the Nariokotome Boy and other early large-bodied specimens have a brain volume more than 50 percent larger than Australopithecus and about 60 percent the volume of people living today.