Homo erectus reaches East Asia
Stone tools in the Nihewan Basin and fossils at Yuanmou put hominins in China by 1.7 million years ago.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 100 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 60 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
Artefacts from Majuangou in the Nihewan Basin of northern China date to about 1.66 million years ago, and hominin teeth from Yuanmou in Yunnan may be older still. These are high-latitude, strongly seasonal environments with cold winters — a very different proposition from the African savanna, and evidence that early Homo was already ecologically flexible. Later Chinese sites, above all Zhoukoudian, become central to twentieth-century debates about human origins.