The History of Our Tribe Hominini Textbook Part IV Pleistocene Epoch Chapter 27 The erectus Grade

27 . The erectus Grade The species that are collectively known as the erectus grade are believed to be descendants of the African erectus form , Homo , which in turn is thought to be descended from one of the two species of early Homo , habilis or . They lived in one form or another from to as recently as kya . erectus was first discovered by Eugene in 1891 ( see Figure ) at the site on the Solo River in Java . He had gone to Asia to find evidence of human ancestors , since the popular notion at the time was that we originated there . BIN ! AUS JAVA . VON . A . I I I . Figure Title page from monograph . Eugene book is in the public domain . The first genus and species combination he assigned to the material was ( upright ) He then changed it to erectus ( upright ) It was only later , after much more material had been unearthed , that Franz persuaded researchers that the species did not differ enough from our own to warrant different genus status . In more recent years , researchers have argued that the material from different continents should be assigned to different species . While we can not know if the different continental represent true biological species , incapable of 163

ing , they are now minimally classified as geographic species . Since the holotype or type specimen came from Asia ( Java ) the species designation erectus was retained for Asian material . The African material has come to be known as , contemporary material from ( in the Republic of Georgia ) is known as , material from Spain as . The strangely tiny and species from the island of Flores , Homo , is thought to be a derived form of erectus . Some researchers place all of this material into the taxon erectus . Depending on which model people embrace for explaining the gin of our own species , one or more of those species would have evolved into archaic or premodern humans and , subsequently , anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens . The Regional or Model supposes that whatever erectus forms were present in the various locations evolved through a premodern form , often termed Archaic Homo sapiens whether or wise , and then into via gene flow between the populations . However with the more widely accepted Recent African Origin ( theory , which holds that our ancestors arose in Africa kya and then moved out to populate the rest of the world , those erectus species that did not contribute to our lineage went extinct . The problem remains as to which of the later erectus forms gave rise to our premodern form , Homo . At this point in time , the most plausible choices for the origin of , the ancestor of both Homo and , are Homo or Homo . 164 The History of Our Tribe