Some suggest Neanderthal, Homo erectus, or Homo heidelbergensis to be the creature, but no remains of any of those species have been found in the Americas.

What is now China was inhabited by Homo erectus more than a million years ago.

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.

Perhaps the most famous specimen of Homo erectus found in China is the so-called Peking Man discovered in 1923-27.

In 1995, one of the oldest hominids, representing a possible link between Homo erectus and an archaic Homo sapiens was found in Buya, Eritrea by Italian scientists dated to over 1 million years old ( the oldest of its kind ), providing a link between hominids and the earliest humans.

Furthermore it is believed that the Eritrean section of the Danakil Depression was a major player in terms of human evolution and may " document the entire evolution of Homo erectus up to the transition to anatomically modern humans.

Java Man originally carried Haeckel's Pithecanthropus label, though they were later reclassified as Homo erectus.

During the next million years a process of encephalization began, and with the arrival of Homo erectus in the fossil record, cranial capacity had doubled to 850cc.

Homo erectus and Homo ergaster were the first of the hominina to leave Africa, and these species spread through Africa, Asia, and Europe between.

According to the Recent African Ancestry theory, modern humans evolved in Africa possibly from Homo heidelbergensis and migrated out of the continent some 50, 000 to 100, 000 years ago, replacing local populations of Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis.

The pattern of encephalization started with Homo habilis which at approximately 600 cc had a brain slightly larger than chimpanzees, and continued with Homo erectus ( 800-1100 cc ), and reached a maximum in Neanderthals with an average size of ( 1200-1900cc ), larger even than Homo sapiens.

Despite the 1891 discovery by Eugène Dubois of what is now called Homo erectus at Trinil, Java, it was only in the 1920s when such fossils were discovered in Africa, that intermediate species began to accumulate.

From the fossil beds of Olduvai and Lake Turkana they amassed fossils of Asutralopithecines, early Homo, and even Homo erectus.

Replica of fossil skull of Homo ergaster ( African Homo erectus ).

During the next million years a process of encephalization began, and with the arrival of Homo erectus in the fossil record, cranial capacity had doubled.

Homo erectus were the first of the hominina to leave Africa, and these species spread through Africa, Asia, and Europe between.

However, this theory is undermined by the disproportional fear of spiders in comparison to other, potentially dangerous creatures that were present during Homo sapiens environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.

In botany, the author abbreviation used to indicate Linnaeus as the authority for species ' names is L. In 1959, Carl Linnaeus was designated as the lectotype for Homo sapiens, which means that following the nomenclatural rules, Homo sapiens was validly defined as the animal species to which Linnaeus belonged.

Homo habilis is the first species for which we have positive evidence of use of stone tools.

Homo habilis is the first species for which we have positive evidence of use of stone tools.

Homo sapiens is the only extant species of its genus, Homo.

In some cases this is due to the dearth of fossils, in other cases it is due to the slight differences used to classify species in the Homo genus.

These are proposed species names for fossils from about 1. 9 – 1. 6 Ma, whose relation to Homo habilis is not yet clear.

Often the early phase, from 1. 8 to 1. 25 Ma, is considered to be a separate species, Homo ergaster, or it is seen as a subspecies of Homo erectus, Homo erectus ergaster.

A famous example of Homo erectus is Peking Man ; others were found in Asia ( notably in Indonesia ), Africa, and Europe.

H. floresiensis is intriguing both for its size and its age, being an example of a recent species of the genus Homo that exhibits derived traits not shared with modern humans.

There is no known evidence that any " Homo " specimens appeared by 2. 5 Ma.

Homo habilis ( or possibly H. rudolfensis ) was the earliest known species of the genus Homo until May 2010, when H. gautengensis was proposed by Darren Curnoe, a species theorized to be even older than H. habilis.

However, this is not the first species of homininae: the first species of genus Homo, Homo habilis, are theorized to have evolved in East Africa at least 2 million years ago, and members of this species populated different parts of Africa in a relatively short time.

In 1969, Heuvelmans wrote an article in a Belgian scientific journal about the Iceman suggesting that it was a new species with Neanderthal affinities called Homo pongoides, and theorized it was shot and killed in Vietnam during the Vietnam War.

Evolutionary aesthetics refers to evolutionary psychology theories in which the basic aesthetic preferences of Homo sapiens are argued to have evolved in order to enhance survival and reproductive success.

A number of other changes have also characterized the evolution of humans, among them an increased importance on vision rather than smell ; a smaller gut ; loss of body hair ; evolution of sweat glands ; a change in the shape of the dental arcade from being u-shaped to being parabolic ; development of a chin ( only found in Homo sapiens ), development of styloid processes ; development of a descended larynx.

As modern humans spread out from Africa they encountered other hominins such as Homo neanderthalensis and the so-called Denisovans, who may have evolved from populations of Homo erectus that had left Africa already around.

While some other, extinct Homo species might have been ancestors of Homo sapiens, many were likely our " cousins ", having speciated away from our ancestral line.

Some scientists have proposed moving this species out of Homo and into Australopithecus due to the morphology of its skeleton being more adapted to living on trees rather than to moving on two legs like Homo sapiens.

Scientists have suggested that this was another Homo habilis, but this has not been confirmed.

In the early Pleistocene, 1. 5 – 1 Ma, in Africa some populations of Homo habilis are thought to have evolved larger brains and made more elaborate stone tools ; these differences and others are sufficient for anthropologists to classify them as a new species, Homo erectus.

Most current researchers place Rhodesian Man within the group of Homo heidelbergensis, though other designations such as Archaic Homo sapiens and Homo sapiens rhodesiensis have been proposed.

Some scholars consider the transition to have been more gradual, with some features already appearing among Archaic Homo sapiens already around 200, 000 years ago.

This move out of Africa seems to have been unsuccessful and by c. 60, 000 BC in Israel / Syria, especially at Amud, classic Neanderthal groups seem to have profited from the worsening climate to have replaced Homo sapiens, who seem to have been confined once more to Africa.

Stone hand-axes from early hominoids, probably Homo Erectus, have been unearthed in Lenggong.

Isolated remains of Homo erectus in Hathnora in the Narmada Valley in central India indicate that India might have been inhabited since at least the Middle Pleistocene era, somewhere between 500, 000 and 200, 000 years ago.