Homo erectus in East Asia: Human Ancestor or Evolutionary Dead-End?

37 evolution, part of an intractable debate that continues to swirl over the origins of anatomically modern people. Many readers are assuredly familiar with the contours of this debate, between those who advocate a recent, uniregional origin for modern Homo sapiens in Africa (henceforth termed the “recent out of Africa,” or ROA, hypothesis) versus those who support a more deeply rooted, multiregional origin for our species (termed MRE for “multiregional evolution”). The implications of these two differing interpretations of modern human origins for understanding the course of human evolution and the status of H. erectusduring the last 1.8 million years of earth history are manifold. One major premise of the uniregional ROA hypothesis is that modern humans originated in sub-Saharan Africa between 100-200,000 years ago by evolving a set of unique physical features and cultural innovations that allowed them to disperse throughout the world, replacing older, more archaic human lineages that had established themselves in various regional settings. Most advocates of this hypothesis view the genus Homo as subject to the same evolutionary processes of divergence and differentiation as any other biological entity. ROA supporters are thus prone to use cladistic analysis, which attempts to partition fossil specimens into distinct evolutionary lineages by documenting uniquely derived features (autapomorphies) that separate one from another (Harrison 1993; see box 1). In order to better understand the nature of Homo erectus, the significance of its evolutionary history in East Asia, and the role it played in human evolution, it is first necessary to come to grips with what is meant by the term itself, as H. erectus has come to mean different things to different people. For some, H. erectusrepresents the first truly pandemic human species and the direct progenitor of archaic and modern H. sapiens. For others, H. erectus is an interesting footnote to the saga of human evolution, a distinct species that emerged in the East, only to go extinct without issue when modern humans expanded their range out of Africa to encompass the far reaches of the Old World. From this latter perspective H. erectus serves as the eastern analog of what is thought, by some, to be another failed experiment in humanity the Neanderthals. The very manner in which H. erectusis conceived is thus held captive to two competing views of human Homo erectus in East Asia: Human Ancestor or Evolutionary Dead-End?