Homo erectus’ last known appearance dates to roughly 117,000 years ago
Homo erectus, a humanlike species that dispersed from Africa into parts of Europe and Asia roughly 2 million years ago, eventually reached the Indonesian island of Java before dying out. Scientists say they have now resolved a controversy over just how long ago the last known H. erectus inhabited the Southeast Asian island. New evidence narrows the timing of this hominid’s final stand on Java to between 117,000 and 108,000 years ago, says a team led by geochronologists Yan Rizal of Indonesia’s Bandung Institute of Technology and Kira Westaway of Macquarie University in Sydney. The scientists present their results December 18 in Nature. If the findings hold up to scrutiny, the fossils would be the last known occurrence of H. erectus anywhere in the world, and would show that the hominid was part of a complex interplay among different Homo species in Southeast Asia that started more than 100,000 years ago. Excavations at...