Homo erectus reaches Java
Hominins arrive in Southeast Asia, and the first fossil of a human ancestor ever found is one of them.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 100 thousand years
- Known to
- ± 60 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
Homo erectus is present in Java by around 1.6 million years ago, at Sangiran and Mojokerto. It was here in 1891 that Eugene Dubois — who had gone to the Dutch East Indies deliberately looking for a transitional form — found the skullcap and femur he named Pithecanthropus erectus. It was the first fossil of an extinct human ancestor ever discovered, and it was widely rejected for decades. Java erectus persists remarkably late, possibly to about 110,000 years ago.