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† Pithecanthropus erectus
† Sinanthropus pekinensis
† Javanthropus soloensis
† Meganthropus paleojavanicus

Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois (1890s) first described the species as Pithecanthropus erectus ("upright ape-man"), based on a calotte (skullcap) and a modern-looking femur found from the bank of the Solo River at Trinil, in central Java. His find is commonly referred to as Java Man. However, thanks to Canadian anatomist Davidson Black's (1921) initial description of a lower molar, which was dubbed Sinanthropus pekinensis, most of the early and spectacular discoveries of this taxon took place at Zhoukoudian in China. German anatomist Franz Weidenreich provided much of the detailed description of this material in several monographs published in the journal Palaeontologica Sinica (Series D). However, nearly all of the original specimens were lost during World War II. High quality Weidenreichian casts do exist and are considered to be reliable evidence; these are curated at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.

Throughout much of the 20th century, anthropologists debated the role of H. erectus in human evolution. Early in the century, due to discoveries on Java and at Zhoukoudian, it was believed that modern humans first evolved in Asia. This contradicted Charles Darwin's idea of African human origin. However, during the 1950s and 1970s, numerous fossil finds from East Africa (Kenya) yielded evidence that the oldest hominins originated there. It is now believed that H. erectus is a descendant of earlier hominins such as Australopithecus and early Homo species (e.g., H. habilis), although new findings in 2007 suggest that H. habilis and H. erectus coexisted and may be separate lineages from a common ancestor.^[2]

A homo erectus skull, Tchadanthropus uxoris, discovered in 1961, is the partial skull of the first early hominid till then discovered in Central Africa, found in Chad during an expedition led by the anthropologist Yves Coppens.^[3] While some then thought it was a variety of the Homo habilis,^[4] the Tchadanthropus uxoris is no longer considered to be a separate species, and scholars consider it to be Homo erectus.^[3][5]

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