Homo erectus was the first human relative with a body much like ours: tall and long-legged, with shorter arms and proportions much like our own. It appeared in Africa about 2 million years ago, spread as far as Georgia, China and Java, and survived on Java until about 110 000 years ago. That may make it the longest-lived human species of all.
A body like ours
Height estimates for Homo erectus range from about 145 to 185 cm and weights from about 40 to 68 kg. Its body was strikingly modern. The most complete skeleton, the Turkana Boy from Kenya, about 1.6 million years old, belonged to a youth who would probably have grown to about 163 cm.
Its head was less modern. The skull was long and low, with a ridge along the top, a thick bar of bone across the back and a heavy, continuous brow ridge. The jaw jutted forward, the teeth were large and there was no chin. Its brain grew larger over its long history, from about 550 cm³ in early skulls to about 1 250 cm³ in late ones from Java. It may have been the first human relative with a fleshy, projecting nose.
Out of Africa
The oldest skull with clear Homo erectus features, from Drimolen in South Africa, is about 2 million years old. Within about 150 000 years it had spread out of Africa: at Dmanisi in Georgia it was living about 1.85 to 1.78 million years ago. In 2026 a team used a dating method based on radioactive elements in buried sediment to put three skulls from Yunxian in China at about 1.77 million years old. A 2025 study had placed one of those skulls on the Denisovan branch, using an age of about 1 million years, and the 2026 paper leaves open how the older date changes that placement.
It was first discovered far from Africa. In 1891 Dubois found a skullcap and a tooth at Trinil on Java, and named the species Pithecanthropus erectus.
Tools and fire
Homo erectus is linked with the Acheulean handaxe, a carefully shaped, teardrop-shaped stone tool that appears by about 1.76 million years ago, alongside the simpler flaked tools of earlier times. At Trinil, a freshwater shell between about 546 000 and 436 000 years old carries deliberately engraved lines.
Whether it controlled fire is a long-running question. What its excavators call the earliest secure evidence of fire in an archaeological layer, burnt bone and plant ash in Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa, is about 1 million years old. Fire only becomes a regular part of human life much later, about 400 000 to 300 000 years ago. Homo erectus ate meat regularly, and may also have eaten honey and tubers.
New clues from proteins
DNA has never been recovered from Homo erectus. In 2026, however, a team extracted proteins from the tooth enamel of six individuals from three sites in China, about 400 000 years old. They found a protein variant that may mark East Asian Homo erectus, and another, previously seen in Denisovans and some modern humans, in all six. The researchers suggested that Denisovans, and through them some people alive today, inherited it from populations related to Homo erectus.
The last of its kind
The last known Homo erectus lived at Ngandong on the Indonesian island of Java between about 117 000 and 108 000 years ago. They seem to have died out as the open grasslands they lived in were replaced by rainforest.
