Animals Homo erectus Encountered: Life Among the Giants

At Dmanisi in Georgia, about 1.8 million years ago, a group of early humans died near a lake in the foothills of the Caucasus. Their skulls, now among the most famous fossils of early Homo (see the Dmanisi hominins), lie in the same sediments as the bones of sabre-toothed cats, giant hyenas, wolves, bears, rhinos, mammoths, horses and a giant ostrich.

That list is a snapshot of the animals Homo erectus encountered. Over nearly two million years, the species lived from southern Africa to the Java Sea, and each region had its own cast of predators and prey. The common thread was a medium-sized, tool-using human making a living among heavyweights.

Which animals did Homo erectus encounter?

Homo erectus appeared in Africa a little before 1.9 million years ago. It stood up to about 1.8 metres tall, had long legs suited to long-distance walking, and a brain between roughly 550 and 1,100 cubic centimetres. It was the first hominin to leave Africa.

That journey took it through very different ecosystems: African savannas and lake margins, the woodlands of the Caucasus, the cold steppe of northern China, and the tropical forests and river valleys of Java.

Africa: butchers and prey

East African sites show erectus on both sides of the food chain. Cut marks on antelope and other large mammal bones from Koobi Fora in Kenya and Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania show regular butchery.

At Olorgesailie in southern Kenya, an Acheulean site packed with handaxes, Pat Shipman and colleagues argued in 1981 that people had butchered dozens of giant geladas, Theropithecus oswaldi, a baboon relative much larger than any living monkey. Lewis Binford and others questioned that interpretation, and the site remains a debated case of primate hunting.

Erectus was also hunted. A 1.45-million-year-old hominin shin bone from Koobi Fora, KNM-ER 741, carries two marks that match the teeth of a big cat, as well as stone-tool cut marks (see cannibalism in human evolution). Lions, sabre-tooths, leopards, hyenas and crocodiles all shared the landscape.

Dmanisi: a crowded lakeshore

The Dmanisi fauna is unusually rich. It includes both Megantereon and Homotherium, the giant hyena Pachycrocuta, an early wolf (Canis etruscus), a bear, the southern mammoth (Mammuthus meridionalis), an Etruscan rhinoceros, horses, deer and a giant ostrich.

The large number of carnivores suggests competition for carcasses was intense. Whether the Dmanisi people hunted, scavenged from big cat kills, or both, is still argued. Their small brains, around 550–750 cubic centimetres, did not stop them from surviving in this crowded setting.

Hunter or hunted at Zhoukoudian?

Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, is the cave site of "Peking Man". Burial dating published by Guanjun Shen and colleagues in 2009 puts the lower layers at about 770,000 years old.

For decades, burned bones and thick ash-like layers were read as proof that erectus lived and cooked in the cave. In 1998, Steve Weiner and colleagues found burned bone but no clear hearths or wood ash in the layers they tested, and argued that much of the "ash" was other sediment. Later studies have found some evidence of fire, so the question is still open.

In 2004, Noel Boaz and colleagues re-examined the bones. Many of the hominin fossils, along with many animal bones, show damage that matches the gnawing of hyenas. They argued that the cave was at least partly a den of the giant hyena Pachycrocuta, and that some erectus individuals were dragged in as prey or scavenged. The cave also held bones of giant deer, bears, big cats and rhinos.

The giant ape of southern China

Gigantopithecus blacki was the largest ape that ever lived. It is known from only four lower jaws and roughly 2,000 teeth, the first of them bought from Chinese medicine shops in the 1930s, before excavations found more in caves. Size estimates, often around 3 metres tall and 200–300 kilograms, are rough guesses from the teeth.

In 2024, Yingqi Zhang, Kira Westaway and colleagues dated 22 caves in Guangxi and found that Gigantopithecus died out between about 295,000 and 215,000 years ago. As forests became more seasonal, it seems to have failed to switch to new foods, while orangutans in the same region adapted.

Did erectus meet it? Stone tools in the Bose Basin of Guangxi date to about 800,000 years ago, and erectus lived in southern China during this period. The two may well have shared forests, but no site shows direct contact.

Java: tigers, buffalo and elephant relatives

On Java, where Eugène Dubois found the first erectus fossil at Trinil in 1891, the fauna was a mix of mainland Asian animals. It included the elephant relative Stegodon, a large water buffalo, deer, a small antelope (Duboisia), hippos and tigers. Java was often joined to the mainland when sea levels were low, so large mammals could walk in.

The last known erectus lived at Ngandong on the Solo River, between about 117,000 and 108,000 years ago. Further east, on Flores, which was never connected to the mainland, a different hominin lived with dwarf Stegodon and Komodo dragons (see the strange animals of Flores).

Elephants of every size

Wherever erectus went in Asia, it met Stegodon. At Gesher Benot Ya'aqov in Israel, about 780,000 years ago, Acheulean toolmakers butchered straight-tusked elephants and used fire. The species of hominin there is unknown, but it was probably related to erectus or descended from it. Large carcasses were a huge food source for any group able to process them.

Why it matters

Homo erectus thrived for well over a million years across many ecosystems and animal communities. That flexibility, helped by stone tools and eventually fire, let a medium-sized primate shift from frequent prey towards confident predator. For later animals, see Ice Age animals early humans encountered, or trace erectus on the interactive family tree.