Homo erectus across Asia: 'Java Man' and 'Peking Man'
- Date
- c. 1.5 million – 300,000 years ago
- Category
- Exploration & colonisation
- Region
- East and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, China)
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
Homo erectus colonised eastern and southeastern Asia and persisted there for well over a million years.
In 1891 the Dutch physician Eugène Dubois discovered a skullcap and femur at Trinil on the Solo River in Java — 'Java Man', the first Homo erectus fossil ever found and long disputed as a 'missing link'. Older Javan fossils from Sangiran reach back to roughly 1.5 million years ago, documenting one of the earliest human footholds in the tropics. Far to the north, the cave system at Zhoukoudian near Beijing yielded the rich 'Peking Man' assemblage excavated from the 1920s onward, dated to roughly 770,000–400,000 years ago, with contested but increasingly accepted evidence for the use of fire. (Tragically, the original Peking Man fossils vanished during the Second World War and are known today mainly from casts.) Together these finds show Homo erectus thriving across an enormous range of Asian environments, from equatorial forest to cold temperate latitudes, demonstrating the species' adaptability and its status as humanity's first truly wide-ranging ancestor.
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Related exploration & colonisation events
- Dmanisi: the earliest well-dated humans in Eurasiac. 1.8 million years ago
- Pre-Clovis America: Monte Verde and the Pacific coastal routec. 16,000–14,500 years ago
- Settlement of Sahul: human occupation of Australia at Madjedbebec. 65,000 years ago
- White Sands footprints: humans in the Americas during the Last Glacial Maximumc. 23,000–21,000 years ago
- Earliest human occupation of the high-altitude Tibetan Plateauc. 40,000 – 30,000 years ago
- Earliest humans reach Asia: stone tools at Shangchen, Chinac. 2.1 million years ago
Further reading
The wider story
A History of Southeast Asia: Critical Crossroads
Authoritative yet readable history of the whole region, mainland and maritime.
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