Homo heidelbergensis is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human which existed during the Middle Pleistocene. It was subsumed as a subspecies of H. erectus in 1950 as H. e. heidelbergensis, but towards the end of the century, it was more widely classified as its own species. It is debated whether or not to constrain H. heidelbergensis to only Europe or to also include African and Asian specimens, and this is further confounded by the type specimen being a jawbone, because jawbones feature few diagnostic traits and are generally missing among Middle Pleistocene specimens. Thus, it is debated if some of these specimens could be split off into their own species or a subspecies of H. erectus. Because the classification is so disputed, the Middle Pleistocene is often called the "muddle in the middle".
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 genus of great ape that emerged from the genus Australopithecus and encompasses the extant species Homo sapiens and a number of 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 most closely related to the species Australopithecus africanus within Australopithecus. The closest living relatives of Homo are of the genus Pan, with the ancestors of Pan and Homo estimated to have diverged around 5.7-11 million years ago during the Late Miocene.
Gigantopithecus is an extinct genus of ape that lived in southern China from 2 million to approximately 300-200,000 years ago during the Early to Middle Pleistocene, represented by one species, Gigantopithecus blacki. Potential identifications have also been made in Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The first remains of Gigantopithecus, two third molar teeth, were identified in a drugstore by anthropologist Ralph von Koenigswald in 1935, who subsequently described the ape. In 1956, the first mandible and more than 1,000 teeth were found in Liucheng, and numerous more remains have since been found in at least 16 sites. Only teeth and four mandibles are known currently, and other skeletal elements were likely consumed by porcupines before they could fossilise. Gigantopithecus was once argued to be a hominin, a member of the human line, but it is now thought to be closely allied with orangutans, classified in the subfamily Ponginae.
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.
Archaic humans is a broad category denoting all species of the genus Homo that are not Homo sapiens. Among the earliest modern human remains are those from Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, Florisbad in South Africa (259 ka), and Omo-Kibish I in southern Ethiopia. Some examples of archaic humans include H. antecessor (1200–770 ka), H. bodoensis (1200–300 ka), H. heidelbergensis (600–200 ka), Neanderthals, H. rhodesiensis (300–125 ka) and Denisovans,
He County or Hexian is a county in the east of Anhui Province, China, under the jurisdiction of Ma'anshan. It has a population of 650,000 and an area of 1,412 square kilometres (545 sq mi). The government of He County is located in Liyang Town.
Dali man is the remains of a late Homo erectus or archaic Homo sapiens who lived in the late-mid Pleistocene epoch. The remains comprise a complete fossilized skull, which was discovered by Liu Shuntang in 1978 in Dali County, Shaanxi Province, China.
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.
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 Denisovans or Denisova hominins(di-NEE-sə-və) are an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human that ranged across Asia during the Lower and Middle Paleolithic, and lived, based on current evidence, from 285 to 25 thousand years ago. Denisovans are known from few physical remains; consequently, most of what is known about them comes from DNA evidence. No formal species name has been established pending more complete fossil material.
The Red Deer Cave people were a prehistoric population of modern humans known from bones dated to between about 17,830 to c. 11,500 years ago, found in Red Deer Cave and Longlin Cave, Yunnan Province, in Southwest China.
Homo naledi is an extinct species of archaic human discovered in 2013 in the Rising Star Cave system, Gauteng province, South Africa, dating to the Middle Pleistocene 335,000–236,000 years ago. The initial discovery comprises 1,550 specimens of bone, representing 737 different skeletal elements, and at least 15 different individuals. Despite this exceptionally high number of specimens, their classification with other Homo species remains unclear.
The Dmanisi hominins, Dmanisi people, or Dmanisi man were a population of Early Pleistocene hominins whose fossils have been recovered at Dmanisi, Georgia. The fossils and stone tools recovered at Dmanisi range in age from 1.85 to 1.77 million years old, making the Dmanisi hominins the earliest well-dated hominin fossils in Eurasia and the best preserved fossils of early Homo from a single site so early in time, though earlier fossils and artifacts have been found in Asia. Though their precise classification is controversial and disputed, the Dmanisi fossils are highly significant within research on early hominin migrations out of Africa. The Dmanisi hominins are known from over a hundred postcranial fossils and five famous well-preserved skulls, referred to as Dmanisi Skulls 1–5.
Baishiya Karst Cave is a high-altitude paleoanthropological site and a Tibetan Buddhist sanctuary located on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in Xiahe County, Gansu, China. This karst cave is the site of the discovery of the earliest hominin fossil found on the Tibetan Plateau, the Xiahe mandible. The mandible, by way of palaeoproteomic analysis, is the first confirmed discovery of a Denisovan fossil outside of Denisova Cave. This fossil discovery shows that archaic hominins were present in a high-altitude, low-oxygen environment by around 160,000 years ago.
The Xiahe mandible is a hominin fossil jaw (mandible) discovered in Baishiya Karst Cave, located on the northeastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in Xiahe County, Gansu, China. By the use of palaeoproteomic analysis, it is the first confirmed discovery of a Denisovan fossil outside of Denisova Cave, and the most complete confirmed Denisovan fossil. This fossil discovery shows that archaic hominins were present in a high-altitude, low-oxygen environment around 160,000 years ago. Discover, Science News and Nova all named the discovery of the mandible in their lists of Top Science Stories of 2019.
Homo longi is an extinct species of archaic human identified from a nearly complete skull, nicknamed 'Dragon Man', from Harbin on the Northeast China Plain, dating to at minimum 146,000 years ago during the Middle Pleistocene. The skull was discovered in 1933 along the Songhua River while the Dongjiang Bridge was under construction for the Manchukuo National Railway. Due to a tumultuous wartime atmosphere, it was hidden and only brought to paleoanthropologists in 2018. H. longi is probably the same species as the Denisovans, though this is unconfirmable without genetic testing.
The hominin remains discovered at Sambungmacan are a series of four archaic human fossils assigned to Homo erectus and discovered in Java. The first is the calvarium is Sm 1, the second is a tibial fragment Sm 2, and the third and fourth are calvaria Sm 3 and Sm 4. Laitman and Tattersall (2001) suggested naming Sm 3, the second calvarium in the series, Homo erectus newyorkensis, but later sources do not agree with this taxonomic scheme.
The Kabuh Formation is a Plio-Pleistocene geologic formation from Central Java, consisting of several unnamed members belonging to the Kendeng Group. Many of the fossils discovered from Sambungmacan belonging to this group were discovered in an accumulated sediment deposit in a flood-controlling canal near the Solo River, including a series of hominin crania that are similar in anatomy and geologically younger than the Ngandong hominins upstream. This area was excavated throughout the 1970s.
The Hualongdong people are extinct humans that lived in eastern China around 300,000 years ago during the late Middle Pleistocene. Discovered by a research team led by Xiujie Wu and Liu Wu, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, from the Hualong Cave in Dongzhi County at Anhui Province in 2006, they are known from about 30 fossils that belong to 16 individuals. The first analysis of the skull fragments collected in 2006 suggested that they could be members of Homo erectus. For some of the specimens, their exact position as a human species is not known. More complete fossils found in 2015 indicate that they cannot be directly assigned to any Homo species as they also exhibit archaic human features. They are the first humans in Asia to have both archaic and modern human features. They are likely a distinct species that form a separate branch in the human family tree.
