Once hominids set out from Africa almost two million years ago, they gradually spread into Asia first, then Europe. The early history of human occupation of western Europe is poorly understood, but the limited evidence available suggests that the first European residents arrived sometime around one million years ago. The fossil record in Asia is much more ancient, however. One species, Homo erectus, seems to have enjoyed an extraordinarily long existence in Asia, apparently surviving there for well over 1.5 million years, perhaps until just 40,000 years ago.

Homo erectus Illustration by Jay H. Matternes

Since the 1890s, researchers working in China and Southeast Asia have discovered numerous fossilized remains of what paleoanthropologists now classify as the species Homo erectus. These bones, some of which may date back 1.8 million years, reveal that members of H. erectus—with their moderately large brains and essentially modern proportions—resembled today’s humans in many ways. But hominids of this era lacked language and the ability to control fire, and the hominids of eastern Asia made rather unsophisticated stone tools.

During the time H. erectus occupied Asia, other species inhabited Europe—possibly as early as one million years ago. Unfortunately, only a very few European sites have yielded fossil remains or stone tools from before 500,000 years ago. This lack of evidence has made it difficult to identify the earliest Europeans. An approximately 800,000-year-old hominid skull found in Italy, for instance, is one of the oldest from western Europe. The intriguing fossils from Atapuerca, in Spain, are of a similar age, but the two hominids may well belong to different species.