created by Additional_Insect_44 on 27/01/2025 at 03:09 UTC
29 upvotes, 2 top-level comments (showing 2)
I think they were very similar to us In terms of cognitive behavior. But their technology was very slow.
What's the current idea?
Comment by [deleted] at 27/01/2025 at 12:14 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
[removed]
Comment by JoeBiden-2016 at 29/01/2025 at 10:48 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
In terms of morphology, they have been estimated to range in height from a little over four feet / 1.2 m to around five and a half feet (1.5 m) tall, from somewhat gracile to more robust, and to have cranial volumes estimated between around 550 - 600 cc all the way up to as much as 900 - 1000 cc. Although the latter is on the lower end (but within the range of) modern humans, the proportion of brain size to body size is more important than raw size. If just size was the biggest factor, then whales would be the smartest animals ever to exist.
Post cranial skeletons generally look pretty similar to modern humans in all of the critical ways. They appear to have been fully bipedal, even early on. However, some paleoanthropologists who have studied erectus have suggested that their maturation from infant to adult landsmoor along the spectrum of the development sequence of our nearest great ape cousins, rather than modern humans. If that's accurate, them it might be feasible to suggest that longer stages of development / maturation may have been adaptive beneficial for our more recent ancestors, as it gave them the time to learn what they needed (culturally, including language acquisition) to successfully integrate into their societies.
The tools made by *Homo erectus* also vary considerably across their wide geographic and temporal range. The Acheulean hand axe is most associated with erectus occupations, but populations of erectus that moved into Asia appear to have abandoned hand axes, and archaeologists are still not entirely sure what may have taken their place, if anything. Whatever occurred, it's clear that erectus moving into Asia still used (and this made) tools.
Finally, some endocasts (fossilized casts from the inside of erectus crania that can sometimes preserve ghost remnants of brain structure) seem to show development of an area of the brain that today is known to be associated with language processing and use. This has led a number of anthropologists who have studied these into casts to suggest that erectus was capable of, and using, language of some kind.
The archaeological and fossil remains are relatively spotty, but overall, the record seems to point to a related group / chronological sequence of hominins that had culture (very possibly facilitated by linguistic communication), were clearly capable of long distance travel and migration, and adaptation to a range of environments and climates and resources.
How much they were "like" us is very difficult to really put a finger on. They were probably much more similar than different, relative to earlier bipeds, but if the archaeological record is to be believed (and because of time depth, much has been lost, so we have to be careful with hypotheses) then their behavior was probably still fairly different from ours, and they seem to not have been as inclined toward the production of complex technology as our more recent ancestors.
Finally, it's also important to understand that our ancestors and cousins (Neanderthals and Denisovans) and we coexisted with later Homo erectus by several hundred thousand years. So the degree to which later *Homo erectus* was similar to us he's probably much greater, both in terms of their capability for similarity (given that they appear to have had much larger brains in their later eons) and potentially having learned from interactions with later species living in the same regions as they did. We have no direct evidence of interaction, but they certainly seem to have coexisted geographically and temporally, so the possibility is certainly there.