Milford Howell Wolpoff is a paleoanthropologist and professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan and its museum of Anthropology. He is the leading proponent of the multiregional evolution hypothesis that explains the evolution of Homo sapiens as a consequence of evolutionary processes and gene flow across continents within a single species. Wolpoff authored the widely used textbook Paleoanthropology, and co-authored Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction, which reviews the scientific evidence and conflicting theories about the interpretation of human evolution, and biological anthropology's relationship to views about race.
Davidson Black, FRS was a Canadian paleoanthropologist, best known for his naming of Sinanthropus pekinensis. He was Chairman of the Geological Survey of China and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He was known as 步達生 in China.
Peking Man is a subspecies of H. erectus which inhabited the Zhoukoudian cave site in modern northern China during the Chibanian. The first fossil, a tooth, was discovered in 1921, and the Zhoukoudian Cave has since then become the most productive H. erectus site in the world. Peking Man was instrumental in the foundation of Chinese anthropology, and fostered an important dialogue between Western and Eastern science for decades to come. The fossils became the centre of anthropological discussion, and were classified as a direct human ancestor, propping up the Out of Asia hypothesis that humans evolved in Asia.
Homo ergaster is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans who lived in Africa in the Early Pleistocene. Whether H. ergaster constitutes a species of its own or should be subsumed into H. erectus is an ongoing and unresolved dispute within palaeoanthropology. Proponents of synonymisation typically designate H. ergaster as "African Homo erectus" or "Homo erectus ergaster". The name Homo ergaster roughly translates to "working man", a reference to the more advanced tools used by the species in comparison to those of their ancestors. The fossil range of H. ergaster mainly covers the period of 1.7 to 1.4 million years ago, though a broader time range is possible. Though fossils are known from across East and Southern Africa, most H. ergaster fossils have been found along the shores of Lake Turkana in Kenya. There are later African fossils, some younger than 1 million years ago, that indicate long-term anatomical continuity, though it is unclear if they can be formally regarded as H. ergaster specimens. As a chronospecies, H. ergaster may have persisted to as late as 600,000 years ago, when new lineages of Homo arose in Africa.
Meganthropus is an extinct genus of non-hominin hominid ape, known from the Pleistocene of Indonesia. It is known from a series of large jaw and skull fragments found at the Sangiran site near Surakarta in Central Java, Indonesia, alongside several isolated teeth. The genus has a long and convoluted taxonomic history. The original fossils were ascribed to a new species, Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, and for a long time was considered invalid, with the genus name being used as an informal name for the fossils.
Homo is a monotypic genus that emerged from the genus Australopithecus and encompasses the extant species Homo sapiens and several extinct species classified as either ancestral to or closely related to modern humans, including Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis. The oldest member of the genus is Homo habilis, with records of just over 2 million years ago. Homo, together with the genus Paranthropus, is probably sister to Australopithecus africanus, which itself had split from the lineage of Pan, the chimpanzees.
Java Man is an early human fossil discovered in 1891 and 1892 on the island of Java. Estimated to be between 700,000 and 1,490,000 years old, it was, at the time of its discovery, the oldest hominid fossil ever found, and it remains the type specimen for Homo erectus.
Homo rhodesiensis is the species name proposed by Arthur Smith Woodward (1921) to classify Kabwe 1, a Middle Stone Age fossil recovered from Broken Hill mine in Kabwe, Northern Rhodesia. In 2020, the skull was dated to 324,000 to 274,000 years ago. Other similar older specimens also exist.
Colin Peter Groves was a British-Australian biologist and anthropologist. Groves was Professor of Biological Anthropology at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia.
Sinanthropus is an archaic genus in the scientific classification system to which the early hominid fossils of Peking man, Lantian Man, Nanjing Man, and Yuanmou Man were once assigned. All of them have now been reclassified as Homo erectus, and the genus Sinanthropus is disused. Beginning in the year 1928 to the year 1937, 14 fragmented skulls belonging to the hominids were found in various locations in China. Peking and Chou K’ou-tien are two notable places with fossils found. It has been noted by researchers that it is likely that the found fragmented skulls were brought to the cave after being severed from the bodies they belonged to. This is very likely, because most of the found pieces are teeth and jaws. Some skulls are missing large parts which indicates separation before they were fossilized, not the loss of pieces due to fossilization process.
Franz Weidenreich was a Jewish German anatomist and physical anthropologist who studied evolution.
Human taxonomy is the classification of the human species within zoological taxonomy. The systematic genus, Homo, is designed to include both anatomically modern humans and extinct varieties of archaic humans. Current humans have been designated as subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens, differentiated, according to some, from the direct ancestor, Homo sapiens idaltu.
Lantian Man, Homo erectus lantianensis) is a subspecies of Homo erectus known from an almost complete mandible from Chenchiawo (陈家窝) Village discovered in 1963, and a partial skull from Gongwangling (公王岭) Village discovered in 1964, situated in Lantian County on the Loess Plateau. The former dates to about 710–684 thousand years ago, and the latter 1.65–1.59 million years ago. This makes Lantian Man the second-oldest firmly dated H. erectus beyond Africa, and the oldest in East Asia. The fossils were first described by Woo Ju-Kan in 1964, who considered the subspecies an ancestor to Peking Man.
In physical anthropology, post-orbital constriction is the narrowing of the cranium (skull) just behind the eye sockets found in most non-human primates and early hominins. This constriction is very noticeable in non-human primates, slightly less so in Australopithecines, even less in Homo erectus and completely disappears in modern Homo sapiens. Post-orbital constriction index in non-human primates and hominin range in category from increased constriction, intermediate, reduced constriction and disappearance. The post-orbital constriction index is defined by either a ratio of minimum frontal breadth (MFB), behind the supraorbital torus, divided by the maximum upper facial breadth (BFM), bifrontomalare temporale, or as the maximum width behind the orbit of the skull.
Prehistoric Asia refers to events in Asia during the period of human existence prior to the invention of writing systems or the documentation of recorded history. This includes portions of the Eurasian land mass currently or traditionally considered as the continent of Asia. The continent is commonly described as the region east of the Ural Mountains, the Caucasus Mountains, the Caspian Sea, Black Sea and Red Sea, bounded by the Pacific, Indian, and Arctic Oceans. This article gives an overview of the many regions of Asia during prehistoric times.
Wushan Man is a set of fossilised remains of an extinct, undetermined non-hominin ape found in central China in 1985. The remains are dated to around 2 million years ago and were originally considered to represent a subspecies of Homo erectus.
Nanjing Man is a specimen of Homo erectus found in China. Large fragments of one male and one female skull and a molar tooth of were discovered in 1993 in Hulu Cave on the Tangshan (汤山) hills in Jiangning District, Nanjing. The specimens were found in the Hulu limestone cave at a depth of 60–97 cm by Liu Luhong, a local worker. Dating the fossils yielded an estimated age of 580,000 to 620,000 years old.
Homo erectus is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, with its earliest occurrence about 2 million years ago. Its specimens are among the first recognizable members of the genus Homo.
The Mojokerto child, also known as Mojokerto 1 and Perning 1, is the fossilized skullcap of a juvenile early human. It was discovered in February 1936 near Mojokerto by a member of an excavation team led by Ralph von Koenigswald. Von Koenigswald first called the specimen Pithecanthropus modjokertensis but soon renamed it Homo modjokertensis because Eugène Dubois – the discoverer of Java Man, which was then called Pithecanthropus erectus – disagreed that the new fossil was a Pithecanthropus. The skullcap is now identified as belonging to the species Homo erectus.
Yaho or Yayo is an archeological site 160 kilometers northwest of Koro Toro, Chad. In 1961, Yves Coppens excavated a partial hominin face and erected the taxon Tchadanthropus uxoris. Loxodonta atlantica were also discovered from the site.
