The Human Ancestry: Homo Erectus, Neanderthal Man and Homo Heidelbergensis - Assignment Example

The first fossils of Homo erectus (upright man) was a million years old and were discovered in Indonesia. Other notable fossils include the 1.77 million-year-old skull of an elderly man, discovered in Demasi, Georgia. H. erectus was an ancient forefather of modern humans that is thought to have lived between 2 million and 100000 years ago. H. erectus was the first ancestors of humans to have similar limbs to the modern man, without the adaptations required to swing from the branches. This characteristic insinuates that it had adapted to walking, on two legs, in an open grassland environment.

It is likely that H. erectus first evolved from an earlier human ancestor known as Homo habilis, in East Africa. They then spread out. Fossils dating from about 1.8 million years ago until about 100000 years ago have been found in Southeast Asia, Europe, India, China, and the Caucasus. H. erectus would eventually give rise to a host of other early humans such as Homo heidelbergensis, and Homo floresiensis though scientists still do not agree on whether the species is a direct human ancestor to Homo sapiens.

Anthropologists disagree as well on whether all the H. erectus fossils found all over the world represent one species. Homo heidelbergensis The first identified species as Homo heidelbergensis was a jaw discovered near Heidelberg, Germany in 1907. Other finds have been made in Africa, Europe, and Asia since then. They show a less projecting face, bigger braincase, and more prominent nose than H. Erectus. H. heidelbergensis is known to have lived from at least 600,000 years ago in Africa and Europe to may be as late as 250,000 years ago (Fagan and Nadia 145).

The Neanderthal was a species of genus Homo that inhabited Europe and parts of western Asia from about 230,000 to 29,000 years ago. The first fossils of Neanderthal were found in 1856 in a limestone quarry near Dusseldorf in the Neanderthal, Germany. It is generally believed that both Neanderthal and Homo sapiens evolved from the archaic Homo sapiens, but the classification of Neanderthal is based on when in the timeline.