The Far East, one of the twelve…

Homo erectus inhabited what is now China more than a million years ago.

Xiaochangliang, the site of some of the earliest Paleolithic remains in East Asia, located in the Nihewan Basin in Yangyuan County, Hebei, is most famous for the stone tools discovered there, including side and end scrapers, notches, burins, and disc cores.

Although it is generally more difficult to date Asian sites than African sites because Asian sites typically lack volcanic materials that can be dated isotropically, the age of the tools has been magnetostratigraphically dated as 1.36 million years.

This method is more accurate than carbon dating since it uses the data of changes caused by earth's magnetic field.

Turkana Boy is the common name of fossil KNM-WT 15000, a nearly complete skeleton of a hominid that died in the early Pleistocene.

This specimen is the most complete early human skeleton ever found.

It is one and a half million years old.

Turkana Boy is classified as either Homo erectus or Homo ergaster.

His age has been estimated from as old as fifteen years to as young as seven years six months.

The most recent scientific review suggests eight years of age.

It was initially suggested that he would have grown into 1.85 meters tall adult but the most recent analysis argues for the much shorter stature of 1.63 meters.

The reason for this shift has been research showing that his growth maturation differed from that of modern humans in that he would have had a shorter and smaller adolescent growth spurt.

The skeleton was discovered in 1984 by Kamoya Kimeu, a member of a team led by Richard Leakey, at Nariokotome near Lake Turkana in Kenya.

The KNM-WT 15000 skeleton still had features (such as a low sloping forehead, strong brow ridges, and the absence of a chin) not seen in H. sapiens.

The arms were slightly longer.

Turkana Boy seems to have had a projecting nose rather than the open flat nose seen in apes.

His thoracic vertebrae are narrower than in Homo sapiens.

This would have allowed him less motor control over the thoracic muscles that are used in modern humans to modify respiration to enable the sequencing upon single out breaths of complex vocalizations.

The Atlantic World, a pentagonal region encompassing one twelfth of the Earth, includes the Azores, Madeira, northwestern Europe (including western Denmark and western Norway), the British Isles, the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, eastern and central North America, the northern section of Hispaniola, and several smaller island groups, notably Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos.

The eastern boundary, marked at 10° east longitude, divides Scandinavia into Eastern and Western sections, with Western Scandinavia oriented toward the North Atlantic and Eastern Scandinavia centered on the Baltic Sea Basin. This boundary also aligns with the historical eastern border of West Germany (1949–1990), before terminating in south-central Germany at its junction with the neighboring region to the southeast.

The western boundary, at 110° west longitude, cuts through Canada, separating the northern districts of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories from Alberta and Saskatchewan, approximately 75 miles south of the Alberta-Saskatchewan-Montana junction (48.1896851°N)—the northernmost point of the neighboring world to the southwest.

The southwestern boundary follows the division between the upper and lower Mississippi River Basin, then extends eastward into the Atlantic Ocean just south of Jacksonville, Florida, before terminating in northwestern Hispaniola.

HistoryAtlas contains 18,139 entries for The Atlantic World from the Paleolithic period to 1899.

Narrow results by searching for a word or phrase or select from one or more of a dozen filters.

The archaeological site of Xihoudu in Shanxi Province is the earliest recorded use of fire by Homo erectus, which is dated 1.27 million years ago.

The excavations at Yuanmou and later Lantian show early habitation.

Homo antecessor is an extinct human species (or subspecies) that lived between 1.2 million and 800,000 years ago. It was first identified by Eudald Carbonell, Juan Luis Arsuaga, and J. M. Bermúdez de Castro.

One of the earliest known human species in Europe, H. antecessor is thought to have followed a developmental trajectory similar to Homo sapiens, based on tooth eruption patterns—though likely at a faster pace.

Distinctive anatomical features of H. antecessor include:

• A protruding occipital bun,
• A low forehead, and
• The absence of a strong chin.

Some of its skeletal remains are almost indistinguishable from those of the 1.5-million-year-old Turkana Boy, a fossil attributed to Homo ergaster.

To date, the only known fossils of H. antecessor have been discovered at two sites in the Sierra de Atapuerca region of northern Spain: Gran Dolina and Sima del Elefante.

One of the oldest hominids representing a possible link between Homo erectus and an archaic Homo sapiens will be found by Italian scientists at Buya in present Eritrea.

Dated to over one million years old, it is the oldest skeletal find of its kind and provides a link between hominids and the earliest anatomically modern humans.

It is believed that the section of the Danakil Depression in Eritrea was also a major player in terms of human evolution, and may contain other traces of evolution from Homo erectus hominids to anatomically modern humans.

Eighty fossils of six individuals that may have belonged to the species Homo antecessor will be found in 1994 and 1995 in Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains.

Numerous examples of cuts where the flesh had been flensed from the bones indicate that H. antecessor could have practiced cannibalism.

The best-preserved fossil of Homo antecessor is a maxilla that belonged to a ten-year-old individual found in Spain.

Based on paleomagnetic measurements, it is thought to be older than seven hundred and eighty thousand to eight hundred and fifty seven thousand years ago.

With a brain averaging one thousand cubic centimeters in volume. H. antecessor is about one point eight to one point six meters meters (five to six feet) tall, and males weigh roughly ninety kilograms (two hundred pounds).

Their brain sizes are roughly one thousand to eleven hundred and fifty cubic centimeters, smaller than the thirteen hundred and fifty cubic centimeter average found in modern humans.

Due to its scarcity, very little more is known about the physiology of H. antecessor, yet it is likely to have been more robust than H. heidelbergensis.

According to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the co-directors of the excavation in Burgos, H. antecessor might have been right-handed, a trait that makes the species different from the other apes.

This hypothesis is based on tomography techniques.

Arsuaga also claims that the frequency range of audition is similar to H. sapiens, which makes him believe that H. antecessor used a symbolic language and was able to reason.

The cave of Šandalja near Pula/Pola bears evidence of the presence of Homo erectus from about one million years BP, the earliest traces of human life in this part of Europe.

Genetic studies suggest that the functional DNA of modern humans and Homo neanderthalensis diverged five hundred thousand years before the present time.

Similarly, the few specimens of Homo rhodesiensis have also occasionally been classified as a subspecies, but this is not widely accepted.

The analysis indicated that modern humans, Neanderthals, and the Denisova hominin last shared a common ancestor around one million years ago and that this new hominin species was the result of an early migration out of Africa, distinct from the later out-of-Africa migrations associated with Neanderthals and modern humans, but also distinct from the earlier African exodus of Homo erectus.

The estimated time of divergence between Denisovans and Neanderthals is six hundred and forty thousand years ago.

That between both these groups and modern Africans is eight hundred and four thousand years ago.

The divergence of the Denisova mtDNA may result either from the persistence of a lineage purged from the other branches of humanity through genetic drift or else an introgression from an older hominin lineage.

The so-called Peking Man, discovered in 1923-27 at Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, is perhaps the most famous specimen of Homo erectus found in China.

More recently, the finds have been dated from roughly five hundred thousand years ago, although a new ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be dating suggests the remains may be as much as six hundred and eighty thousand to seven hundred and eighty thousand years old.