Homo erectus
The longest-lived human species, and the first with a body built like ours.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 1.2 million years
- Known to
- ± 100 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
Homo erectus appears in Africa around 2 million years ago with a fundamentally reorganised body: tall, long-legged, narrow-hipped, with a barrel chest, small teeth and a brain of 850 to 1,100 cubic centimetres growing over time. It is the first hominin that would not look strange from a distance. It spreads across Africa and Asia, persists for well over a million and a half years — longer than any other human species by a wide margin, several times longer than our own so far — and survives on Java until perhaps 110,000 years ago.