Homo erectus cooking meat. Illustration of a group of Homo erectus butchering and cooking animal meat, making bamboo spears, and warding off scavengers. Homo erectus lived between 1.9 million years ago and 143, 000 years ago, during the Pleistocene epoch. It is one of several extinct hominins in the evolutionary tree that led to modern humans. Fossils of Homo erectus have been found in Africa and in Eurasia in places ranging from Georgia to Armenia, India, China and Indonesia. This scene is based on the 'Peking Man' fossil specimens (700, 000 to 530, 000 years ago) found in the 1920s in northern China, near Beijing (Peking). |