Homo erectus inhabited what is now China more than a million years ago.

Xiaochangliang, the site of some of the earliest Paleolithic remains in East Asia, located in the Nihewan Basin in Yangyuan County, Hebei, is most famous for the stone tools discovered there, including side and end scrapers, notches, burins, and disc cores.

Although it is generally more difficult to date Asian sites than African sites because Asian sites typically lack volcanic materials that can be dated isotropically, the age of the tools has been magnetostratigraphically dated as 1.36 million years.

This method is more accurate than carbon dating since it uses the data of changes caused by earth's magnetic field.

The Atlantic World, a pentagonal region encompassing one twelfth of the Earth, includes the Azores, Madeira, northwestern Europe (including western Denmark and western Norway), the British Isles, the Orkney Islands, the Shetland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, Newfoundland, eastern and central North America, the northern section of Hispaniola, and several smaller island groups, notably Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos.

The eastern boundary, marked at 10° east longitude, divides Scandinavia into Eastern and Western sections, with Western Scandinavia oriented toward the North Atlantic and Eastern Scandinavia centered on the Baltic Sea Basin. This boundary also aligns with the historical eastern border of West Germany (1949–1990), before terminating in south-central Germany at its junction with the neighboring region to the southeast.

The western boundary, at 110° west longitude, cuts through Canada, separating the northern districts of Nunavut and the Northwest Territories from Alberta and Saskatchewan, approximately 75 miles south of the Alberta-Saskatchewan-Montana junction (48.1896851°N)—the northernmost point of the neighboring world to the southwest.

The southwestern boundary follows the division between the upper and lower Mississippi River Basin, then extends eastward into the Atlantic Ocean just south of Jacksonville, Florida, before terminating in northwestern Hispaniola.

HistoryAtlas contains 18,139 entries for The Atlantic World from the Paleolithic period to 1899.

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The archaeological site of Xihoudu in Shanxi Province is the earliest recorded use of fire by Homo erectus, which is dated 1.27 million years ago.

The excavations at Yuanmou and later Lantian show early habitation.

Homo antecessor is an extinct human species (or subspecies) that lived between 1.2 million and 800,000 years ago. It was first identified by Eudald Carbonell, Juan Luis Arsuaga, and J. M. Bermúdez de Castro.

One of the earliest known human species in Europe, H. antecessor is thought to have followed a developmental trajectory similar to Homo sapiens, based on tooth eruption patterns—though likely at a faster pace.

Distinctive anatomical features of H. antecessor include:

• A protruding occipital bun,
• A low forehead, and
• The absence of a strong chin.

Some of its skeletal remains are almost indistinguishable from those of the 1.5-million-year-old Turkana Boy, a fossil attributed to Homo ergaster.

To date, the only known fossils of H. antecessor have been discovered at two sites in the Sierra de Atapuerca region of northern Spain: Gran Dolina and Sima del Elefante.

One of the oldest hominids representing a possible link between Homo erectus and an archaic Homo sapiens will be found by Italian scientists at Buya in present Eritrea.

Dated to over one million years old, it is the oldest skeletal find of its kind and provides a link between hominids and the earliest anatomically modern humans.

It is believed that the section of the Danakil Depression in Eritrea was also a major player in terms of human evolution, and may contain other traces of evolution from Homo erectus hominids to anatomically modern humans.

Eighty fossils of six individuals that may have belonged to the species Homo antecessor will be found in 1994 and 1995 in Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains.

Numerous examples of cuts where the flesh had been flensed from the bones indicate that H. antecessor could have practiced cannibalism.

The best-preserved fossil of Homo antecessor is a maxilla that belonged to a ten-year-old individual found in Spain.

Based on paleomagnetic measurements, it is thought to be older than seven hundred and eighty thousand to eight hundred and fifty seven thousand years ago.

With a brain averaging one thousand cubic centimeters in volume. H. antecessor is about one point eight to one point six meters meters (five to six feet) tall, and males weigh roughly ninety kilograms (two hundred pounds).

Their brain sizes are roughly one thousand to eleven hundred and fifty cubic centimeters, smaller than the thirteen hundred and fifty cubic centimeter average found in modern humans.

Due to its scarcity, very little more is known about the physiology of H. antecessor, yet it is likely to have been more robust than H. heidelbergensis.

According to Juan Luis Arsuaga, one of the co-directors of the excavation in Burgos, H. antecessor might have been right-handed, a trait that makes the species different from the other apes.

This hypothesis is based on tomography techniques.

Arsuaga also claims that the frequency range of audition is similar to H. sapiens, which makes him believe that H. antecessor used a symbolic language and was able to reason.

The cave of Šandalja near Pula/Pola bears evidence of the presence of Homo erectus from about one million years BP, the earliest traces of human life in this part of Europe.

Genetic studies suggest that the functional DNA of modern humans and Homo neanderthalensis diverged five hundred thousand years before the present time.

Similarly, the few specimens of Homo rhodesiensis have also occasionally been classified as a subspecies, but this is not widely accepted.

The analysis indicated that modern humans, Neanderthals, and the Denisova hominin last shared a common ancestor around one million years ago and that this new hominin species was the result of an early migration out of Africa, distinct from the later out-of-Africa migrations associated with Neanderthals and modern humans, but also distinct from the earlier African exodus of Homo erectus.

The estimated time of divergence between Denisovans and Neanderthals is six hundred and forty thousand years ago.

That between both these groups and modern Africans is eight hundred and four thousand years ago.

The divergence of the Denisova mtDNA may result either from the persistence of a lineage purged from the other branches of humanity through genetic drift or else an introgression from an older hominin lineage.

The so-called Peking Man, discovered in 1923-27 at Zhoukoudian, near Beijing, is perhaps the most famous specimen of Homo erectus found in China.

More recently, the finds have been dated from roughly five hundred thousand years ago, although a new ²⁶Al/¹⁰Be dating suggests the remains may be as much as six hundred and eighty thousand to seven hundred and eighty thousand years old.

The earliest known occupation of Britain by humans occurs in the Palaeolithic—the Old Stone Age.

A huge length of time, it sees many changes in the environment, encompassing several glacial and interglacial periods that greatly affect human settlement in the region.

Providing dating for this distant period is difficult and contentious.

The inhabitants of the region at this time are bands of hunter-gatherers who roam northern Europe following herds of animals, or who support themselves by fishing.

Recent (2006) scientific evidence regarding mitochondrial DNA sequences from ancient and modern Europe has shown a distinct pattern for the different time periods sampled in the course of the study.

Despite some limitations regarding sample sizes, the results were found to be non-random.

As such, the results indicate that, in addition to populations in Europe expanding from southern refugia after the last glacial maximum (especially the Franco-Cantabrian region), evidence also exists for various northern refugia.

Southern and eastern Britain at this time are linked to continental Europe by a wide land bridge allowing humans to move freely.

The current position of the English Channel is a large river flowing westwards and fed by tributaries that will later become the Thames and Seine.

Reconstructing this ancient environment has provided clues to the route first visitors took to arrive at what was then a peninsula of the Eurasian continent.

Archaeologists have found a string of early sites located close to the route of a now lost watercourse named the Bytham River, which indicate that it was exploited as the earliest route west into Britain.

There is evidence from bones and flint tools found in coastal deposits near Happisburgh in Norfolk and Pakefield in Suffolk that a species of Homo was present in what is now Britain around seven hundred thousand years ago.