Homo erectus

Sinanthropus pekinensis
Javanthropus soloensis
Meganthropus paleojavanicus

Homo erectus (Latin: "upright man") is an extinct species of the genus Homo. Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois (1890s) first described it as Pithecanthropus erectus, based on a calotte (skullcap) and a modern-looking femur found from the bank of the Solo River at Trinil, in central Java. However, thanks to Canadian anatomist Davidson Black's (1921) initial description of a lower molar, which was dubbed Sinanthropus pekinensis, most of the early and spectacular discoveries of this taxon took place at Zhoukoudian in China. German anatomist Franz Weidenreich provided much of the detailed description of this material in several monographs published in the journal Palaeontologica Sinica (Series D). However, nearly all of the original specimens were lost during World War II. High quality Weidenreichian casts do exist and are considered to be reliable evidence; these are curated at the American Museum of Natural History (NYC) and at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (Beijing).

Throughout much of the 20th century, anthropologists debated the role of H. erectus in human evolution. Early in the century, due to discoveries on Java and at Zhoukoudian, it was believed that modern humans first evolved in Asia. This contradicted Charles Darwin's idea of African human origin. However, during the 1950s and 1970s, numerous fossil finds from East Africa (Kenya) yielded evidence that the oldest hominins originated there. It is now believed that H. erectus is a descendant of earlier hominins such as Australopithecus and early Homo species (e.g., H. habilis); although, new findings in 2007 suggest that H. habilis and H. erectus coexisted and may be separate lineages from a common ancestor.

H. erectus originally migrated from Africa during the Early Pleistocene, possibly as a result of the operation of the Saharan pump, around 2.0 million years ago, and dispersed throughout most of the Old World, reaching as far as Southeast Asia.

Fossilized remains 1.8 and 1.0 million years old have been found in Africa (e.g., Lake Turkana and Olduvai Gorge), Europe (Georgia, Spain), Indonesia (e.g., Sangiran and Trinil), Vietnam, and China (e.g., Shaanxi). H. erectus is an important hominin because it is believed to have been the first to leave Africa. However, some scholars believe that H. erectus is not the direct ancestor of modern H. sapiens.

A homo erectus skull, Tchadanthropus uxoris, discovered in 1961, is the partial skull of the first early hominid till then discovered in Central Africa, found in Chad during an expedition led by the anthropologist Yves Coppens. While some then thought it was a variety of the Homo habilis, the Tchadanthropus uxoris is no longer considered to be a separate species, and scholars consider it to be Homo erectus, and it is even argued that the skull is just a modern human, Homo sapiens sapiens, weathered by the elements to look like an australopithecine skull.