Technology

Homo gautengensis is, as of May 2010, the earliest recognized species in the genus Homo.

While earlier fossils belong to the genus Homo, none have yet been classified in any species.

Analysis announced in May 2010 of a partial skull found decades earlier in South Africa's Sterkfontein Caves near Johannesburg identified the species, named Homo gautengensis by anthropologist Dr Darren Curnoe of the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

While earlier fossils belong to the genus Homo, none have yet been classified in any species.

The species' first remains were originally discovered in 1977 but had been left largely ignored.

They had been catalogued Stw 53 and were noted as being anomalous.

Identification of H. gautengensis was based on partial skulls, several jaws, teeth and other bones found at various times at the Caves.

It emerged over two million years ago and died out approximately six hundred thousand years years ago, and is believed to have arisen earlier than Homo habilis.

According to Curnoe, who led the research project, Homo gautengensis had big teeth suitable for chewing plant material.

It was "small-brained" and "large-toothed," and was "probably an ecological specialist, consuming more vegetable matter than Homo erectus, Homo sapiens, and probably even Homo habilis."

It apparently produced and used stone tools and may even have made fire, as there is evidence for burnt animal bones associated with H. gautengensis' remains.

Curnoe and South African paleoanthropologist colleague Phillip Tobias believe H. gautengensis stood just over three feet tall and weighed about one hundred and ten pounds.

It walked on two feet when on the ground, "but probably spent considerable time in trees, perhaps feeding, sleeping and escaping predators," Curnoe said.

The researchers believe it lacked speech and language skills.

Due to its anatomy and geological age, researchers think that it was a close relative of Homo sapiens but not necessarily a direct ancestor.

Homo habilis (“Handy-man") lives from approximately two point three to one point four million years ago at the beginning of the Pleistocene period.

With a cranial capacity slightly less than half of the size of modern humans, standing no more than one point three meters meters four feet three inches) tall, and with disproportionately long arms compared to modern humans, it has a less protruding face than the australopithecines from which it is thought to have descended.

Despite the ape-like morphology of the bodies, primitive stone tools often accompany H. habilis remains.

Homo habilis has often been thought to be the ancestor of the more gracile and sophisticated Homo ergaster, which in turn gives rise to the more human-appearing species, Homo erectus.

Some experts propose excluding H. habilis from the genus Homo, and renaming as "Australopithecus habilis.” Debates continue over whether H. habilis is a direct human ancestor, and whether all of the known fossils are properly attributed to the species.

New findings in 2007, however, suggest that the two species coexisted and may be separate lineages from a common ancestor instead of H. erectus being descended from H. habilis.

Homo erectus (from the Latin ērĭgĕre, "to put up, set upright”) originated in Africa at the end of the Pliocene epoch and spread as far as China and Java to the later Pleistocene, about one point eight to one point three million years ago.

There is still disagreement on the subject of the classification, ancestry, and progeny of H. erectus, with two major alternative hypotheses: erectus may be another name for Homo ergaster, and therefore the direct ancestor of later hominids such as Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, and Homo sapiens; or it may be an Asian species distinct from African ergaster.

Homo erectus is the only hominid species found in fossil records for much of the Pleistocene.

The phenomena called the Saharan pump has been used to date four waves of human migration from Africa of which H. erectus is the first, migrating from Africa around two million years ago into Southeast and East Asia.

This species will migrate through much of the Old World, giving rise to many variations of humans, notably Homo ergaster, widely accepted to be the direct ancestor of later hominids such as Homo heidelbergensis, Homo sapiens, and Homo neanderthalensis rather than Asian Homo erectus.

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.

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.

The earliest known occupation of Britain by humans occurs in the Palaeolithic—the Old Stone Age.

A huge length of time, it sees many changes in the environment, encompassing several glacial and interglacial periods that greatly affect human settlement in the region.

Providing dating for this distant period is difficult and contentious.

The inhabitants of the region at this time are bands of hunter-gatherers who roam northern Europe following herds of animals, or who support themselves by fishing.

Recent (2006) scientific evidence regarding mitochondrial DNA sequences from ancient and modern Europe has shown a distinct pattern for the different time periods sampled in the course of the study.

Despite some limitations regarding sample sizes, the results were found to be non-random.

As such, the results indicate that, in addition to populations in Europe expanding from southern refugia after the last glacial maximum (especially the Franco-Cantabrian region), evidence also exists for various northern refugia.

Southern and eastern Britain at this time are linked to continental Europe by a wide land bridge allowing humans to move freely.

The current position of the English Channel is a large river flowing westwards and fed by tributaries that will later become the Thames and Seine.

Reconstructing this ancient environment has provided clues to the route first visitors took to arrive at what was then a peninsula of the Eurasian continent.

Archaeologists have found a string of early sites located close to the route of a now lost watercourse named the Bytham River, which indicate that it was exploited as the earliest route west into Britain.

There is evidence from bones and flint tools found in coastal deposits near Happisburgh in Norfolk and Pakefield in Suffolk that a species of Homo was present in what is now Britain around seven hundred thousand years ago.

Paleolithic sites in Potohar near Pakistan's capital Islamabad, will yield the stone tools of the Soan Culture, an archaeological culture of the Lower Paleolithic (from around 1,800,000 to about 300,000 BP) in Pakistan, contemporary to the Acheulean.

It is named after the Soan River Valley in the Sivalik Hills, Pakistan.

The bearers of this culture are thought to be Homo erectus.

Hundreds of edged pebble tools will be discovered in Adiyala and Khasala, about sixteen kilometers (ten miles) from Rawalpindi terrace on the bend of the river.

Hand axes and cleavers will be found at Chauntra.

No human skeletons of this age have yet been found.

Homo cepranensis is a proposed name for a human species, known from only one skullcap discovered in 1994.

The fossil was discovered by archeologist Italo Biddittu and was nicknamed "Ceprano Man" after a nearby town in the province of Frosinone, eighty-nine kilometers southeast of Rome, Italy.

The age of the fossil is estimated to be between three hundred and fifty thousand to five hundred thousand years old.

An adjacent site, Fontana Ranuccio, was dated to 487,000 +/- 6000 years and Muttoni, et al., suggest that Ceprano is most likely four hundred and fifty thousand years old.

The cranial features on the bone seem to be intermediate between those found on Homo erectus and those of later species such as Homo heidelbergensis, which dominated Europe long before Homo neanderthalensis.

There is yet not enough material to make a complete analysis of the individual.

Cranial capacity had again doubled within the Homo genus by six hundred thousand years ago, from H. habilis to an archaic Homo species called Homo heidelbergensis, the second human wave to be pumped from Africa into the Middle East and Western Europe.

Sites such as Boxgrove in Sussex illustrate the later arrival in the archaeological record of heidelbergensis around five hundred thousand years ago.

The cranial capacity of H. heidelbergensis overlaps with the range found in modern humans; these early peoples make Acheulean flint tools (hand axes) and hunt the large native mammals of the period.

They are thought to have driven elephants, rhinoceroses, and hippopotamuses over the tops of cliffs or into bogs to kill them more easily.

Up until the 1970s, these kill sites, often at waterholes where animals would gather to drink, were interpreted as being where Acheulean tool users killed game, butchered their carcasses, and then discarded the tools they had used.

Since the advent of zooarchaeology, which has placed greater emphasis on studying animal bones from archaeological sites, this view has changed.

Many of the animals at these kill sites have been found to have been killed by other predator animals, so it is likely that humans of the period supplemented hunting with scavenging from already dead animals.

The extreme cold of the Anglian Stage, from four hundred and seventy-eight thousand to four hundred and twenty-four thousand years ago, is likely to have driven humans out of Britain altogether and the region will apparently be unoccupied until the ice recedes during the Hoxnian Stage.

Britain first becomes an island about three hundred and fifty thousand years ago, near the beginning of the Wolstonian stage, named after the site of Wolston in the English county of Warwickshire where corresponding deposits were first identified.

This period sees the introduction of Levallois flint tools, possibly by humans arriving from Africa, although finds from Swanscombe and Botany Pit in Purfleet support Levallois technology as a European rather than African introduction.

This more advanced flint technology, which made hunting more efficient, therefore made Britain a more worthwhile place to remain until the increasingly cool climate of the Wolstonian Stage, which apparently includes three periods of glaciation, made continued habitation unattractive, if not impossible.

Acheulean flint tools, typically found with Homo erectus remains, have been found in Wolstonian deposits.