Homo erectus

The story

A boy from 1.6 million years ago

In 1984, on the western shore of Lake Turkana in Kenya, a fossil hunter named Kamoya Kimeu noticed a tiny piece of dark bone on the gravel. It was a fragment of a skull. After a long digging campaign, Richard Leakey's team recovered an almost complete skeleton, with bones of the arms, legs, pelvis and spine. It belonged to a boy of eight to twelve years old, who lived about one million six hundred thousand years ago. His scientific name is KNM-WT 15000, but everyone calls him the Turkana Boy. Even at that age he was about 1.55–1.6 metres tall. As an adult, according to calculations, he would have been over 1.7 metres.

His proportions are surprising: long legs, a narrow chest, a pelvis suited to walking long distances. It is the body of a runner and endurance walker, much more like ours than Lucy's. He belonged to Homo erectus, “upright man”, the species that for a long time has been the star of prehistory.

From Indonesia to Africa

The story of the species began in a place far from Africa. In 1891 the Dutch doctor Eugène Dubois, who had gone to Indonesia precisely to look for the missing link between apes and humans, found on the island of Java, near the village of Trinil, a piece of skull and then a thigh bone. He called them Pithecanthropus erectus, “upright ape-man”. It was the first ancient human fossil found on purpose. Later, in the 1920s and 1930s, in a cave near Zhoukoudian, close to Beijing in China, the remains of dozens of individuals were found, known as “Peking Man”. Those fossils were lost in 1941, during the war, while they were being shipped abroad to keep them safe: the casts and drawings remain.

Only afterwards was it understood that the same beings had lived in Africa too. African fossils, like the Turkana Boy, are often classified by some scholars as a separate species, Homo ergaster, “working man”. Others consider them the earliest form of erectus. The debate is open.

The first great journey

It is thought that Homo erectus appeared in Africa about 2 million years ago and that, in geologically quick time, it reached Asia. The site that surprised people most is Dmanisi in Georgia, in the Caucasus: there, under the ruins of a medieval town, five skulls and many bones about 1.8 million years old have been found since 1991. They are among the oldest evidence of humans outside Africa. These individuals were small, with a brain of only about 550–780 cubic centimetres, and made very simple tools. One of them was an adult who had been almost toothless for years: he survived a long time, so someone must have helped him.

Then, over hundreds of thousands of years, erectus populations arrived in China and Indonesia. Because of the distance it is hard to imagine a single march: they were probably groups that advanced a little at a time, generation after generation, following game and sources of water.

A very long life

Homo erectus is the human species that lasted longest. It lived for almost two million years; the last known remains, at Ngandong in Indonesia, are dated to over 100,000 years ago, although the date is disputed. It changed a great deal over time and space: the brain grew, in the most recent fossils, up to 1,100 cubic centimetres, about three quarters of that of a person today.

It made hand axes, stones worked on two faces into a teardrop or almond shape, which appeared about 1.8–1.7 million years ago (perhaps a little earlier). In all likelihood it knew how to use fire, at least in the later periods, and ate more meat. It hunted and gathered, and scholars think it lived in small groups that helped one another, as the case of the Dmanisi individual cared for by the others shows.

After the end of Homo erectus, its descendants or relatives took different paths, leading to the species we will talk about in the next cards.