Homo erectus - Out of Africa

Homo erectus: Dubois' original specimens found at Trinil (click to enlarge)

Workers at Trinil

Replica of first Zhoukoudian skull, found in 1929 (click to enlarge)

Homo erectus skull Credit: Thomas Roche

Eugène Dubois

Zhoukoudian. After Dubois, beginning in the 1920s, the story of the discovery of Homo erectus shifts to China. There, international research teams found numerous Homo erectus specimens at Zhoukoudian ("Hill of the Dragons"), near Beijing. This putatively new early human was soon dubbed "Peking man" (Beijing was then called Peking).

Davidson Black

The first remains found, two fossil teeth, were obtained by a Swedish team headed by Otto Zdansky, a young Austrian paleontologist. On the basis of this scanty evidence, Canadian anatomist Davidson Black (1926) created the new genus Sinanthropus ("man from China"). Black also managed to persuade the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a large scale excavation project at Zhoukoudian.

In the ensuing years, a few more jaws and teeth were turned up by the Swedish team, now headed by Birger Bohlin, a paleontologist specializing in fossil giraffes. Then, in December 1929 a young member of Black's team, Pei Wenzhong (1904-1982) found the first skull. By 1936, the year that excavation at Zhoukoudian ceased due to the Japanese invasion of China, a total of 14 skulls, 11 jawbones and 147 teeth had been discovered. The material was obviously similar to Dubois' Pithecanthropus erectus (both Dubois' material and that obtained at Zhoukoudian have since been assigned to Homo erectus).

The foramen magnums of the skulls from Zhoukoudian had been artificially enlarged and no postcranial material was found. These facts resulted in speculation that the recovered remains were the product of cannibalism but this has never been established with certainty.

Black died of a heart attack in 1934, and Franz Weidenreich, a German anatomist and anthropologist, inherited the project and it was he who wrote up and published the detailed descriptions of the material. Most of the Zhoukoudian fossils were lost in shipment during World War II, though casts of the original fossil material have been preserved.

Darwin had predicted human origins would be traced to Africa. However, for a time after the discoveries on Java and at Zhoukoudian it was believed that humans had had Asian origins. Fossils assigned to H. erectus
are indeed ancient, dating from 400,000 to 2,000,000 years in age. But other even more ancient fossils, in particular the discovery of very early hominids (australopithecines) in Africa by Raymond Dart, Robert Broom, and the Leakeys led to a shift in opinion back to Africa.

Homo erectus (reconstruction) Museum für Archäologie, Germany. Photo: Lillyundfreya

Whichever of these views is correct, Homo erectus is the earliest hominid known outside of Africa, and was perhaps also the first to use fire. The remains of early humans of this type are generally found in association with Acheulean tools, which represented a step of sophistication above the Oldowan, or "pebble tool" technology characteristic of earlier hominids. They had an average cranial capacity of about 1000 cc (range: 850–1100 cc) — significantly larger than that of earlier hominids. In fact, in brain size certain Homo erectus individuals exceeded many modern humans of normal intelligence. For example, the brain of the Noble Prize winning novelist Anatole France (1844–1924) had a volume of only 1000 cc.

This is not, of course, to say that the brains of modern humans are not larger on average — in fact, Jonathan Swift, a writer I much prefer to France, had a cranial capacity of 2000 cc.