ANT101H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Homo Erectus, Homo Ergaster, Brain Size
Document Summary
About 2 million years ago a major shift occurred in hominin evolution: hominins expanded out of africa into other areas of the old world. There is universal agreement that the hominins found outside of africa are members of genus homo (ignore the hobbit for now) Homo erectus is the species for which there is the most evidence. Since the early hominin fossils have been found only in africa, it seems that hominins were restricted to this continent for as long as 5 million years. The later, more widely dispersed hominins were larger, more committed to a terrestrial habitat and used elaborate stone tools. How to classify these species remains a debate! (anyone surprised by this statement?) There is some variation among the different geographic groups. Even so there is less variation than we saw in the australopithecines we talked about in the previous chapter.
