Homo Erectus: The First Humans

The first human species built like us lasted 1.9 million years. We’re at 300,000.

Imagine the story of Homo erectus as one 24-hour day. It starts at midnight and ends around 110,000 years ago, when the last known members died out.

Now ask: when does our species, Homo sapiens, show up? Not until about 8 p.m. Our whole run, from the first of us to you reading this, would fit in under four hours.

Does that change how you think about being "the successful species"? Let's look at who they were.

Why call them the first humans?

"First human" depends on how you define it. Here, I mean the first species with a body built like ours. Homo erectus was the first of our relatives to have human-like body proportions, with shorter arms and longer legs relative to the torso.

Walking upright is much older. It goes back millions of years before them. What changed was the body plan: built for long-distance walking, less built for climbing.

One famous skeleton is Turkana Boy, a teenager who died about 1.5 million years ago. He stood 5 feet 3 inches tall. That's a body you wouldn't look twice at in a crowd.

They were also travelers. The earliest fossils found outside Africa are from Dmanisi, in Georgia, and date to about 1.8 million years ago. That makes Homo erectus the first known human species to leave Africa.