Man

Homo erectus (1.8 million - 250,000 years ago
- Brain far bigger than Lucy’s (cranial capacity almost 900 cl)
- Long, slim body
- Two legs
- Short forearms
- Food: some plants, but mainly meat
- Used fire and made stone tools
- A world traveller

The name of this species of early human is:
Homo = man
erectus = who stands upright

Homo erectus was more human than Lucy. He could walk better and think better. His descendents went everywhere. They travelled the world. How do we know? Fossils from the Homo erectus family have been found not just all over Africa, but also in Europe and Asia. The first skull and bones were found by Eugène Dubois far away in Asia. Eugène Dubois (1858-1940) was a Dutchman who wanted to search for the missing link between apes and man. But where? Not in the Netherlands, because there were no apes here. He went to the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) where apes were still to be found. In 1891, beside the Solo River in Java, he found a tooth and a skullcap, and a year later a thigh bone. Java man was the “missing link”, he proclaimed. All over the world, people started to hunt for traces of our distant ancestors. With every new fossil they found it became ever clearer that there was not just one “missing link” but a whole chain of them between apes and modern man. Comparison of the fossils that Dubois found on Java in the nineteenth century with other finds from Africa has revealed that what Dubois found was actually a Homo erectus. 

In 1972 Mary Leakey’s son, Richard, and Alan Walker were looking for fossils near Lake Turkana in Kenya. One day a member of their team, Kamoya Kimeu, found a fragment of skull. Later they found more pieces. They proved to form the skeleton of a boy who had died around a million and a half years ago. Human, yes. Bigger brain than Lucy, yes. As big as ours? No. They called him Turkana Boy. His scientific name is Homo erectus, meaning upright man.