Age of Last Known Settlement of Homo Erectus

now.uiowa.edu

22 points·conse_lad··8 comments

Recent discussion of a different article about the same thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21834113

"Homo erectus, one of modern humans’ direct ancestors, was a wandering bunch. [...] But about 400,000 years ago, Homo erectus essentially vanished."

So are they our direct ancestors, or have they vanished? Both can't be true.

Vanished in the sense of "we didn't find anything from them after that period (yet)".

And as they lately discovered with home sapiens: it is very unlikely they went extinct but just 'merged'.

If they are our direct ancestors, then we are surrounded by artifacts built by their descendants, are we not? That's like being confused that no one builds antique vases anymore.

Wikipedia tells me that they ...

> ... are proposed to be the direct ancestors to several human species, such as H. heidelbergensis, H. antecessor, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans.

But by the time they vanished, I gather that those other species already existed.

Why not? They "vanished" around the time that we "appeared", so there is no contradiction.

Most recent evidence puts the earliest appearance of Homo Sapience between 300-500 Kya, perhaps even a bit more than 500 Kya. In practice with evolution there is often an overlap of ancestral and descendant species, especially in isolated environments, and thus the discovery that there probably were Homo Erectus on Java until 100 Kya thus also fits with this.

Do "vanish" and "appear" have another meaning that I'm not aware of? To me, they imply two discontinuities. But if they are our direct ancestors, they simply gradually became us. Or rather, we still are them.

Only 130k? That is very recent, overlapping with modern humans, although they might not have been out of Africa yet.

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