page_title: Homo erectus
section_title: Food
hierarchical_section_title: Homo erectus / Culture / Food
caption_attribution_description: English: http://www.quagga.cat/Projectes/Reconstruccio/Paleoloxodon-aridos-manzanares/18
context_page_description: Homo erectus is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, with its earliest occurrence about 2 mya, and its specimens are among the first recognisable members of the genus Homo. H. erectus was the first human ancestor to spread throughout the Old World, having a distribution in Eurasia extending from the Iberian Peninsula to Java. African populations of H. erectus are likely to be the direct ancestors to several human species, such as H. heidelbergensis and H. antecessor, with the former generally considered to have been the direct ancestor to Neanderthals and Denisovans, and sometimes also modern humans. Asian populations of H. erectus are likely ancestral to H. floresiensis and possibly to H. luzonensis. As a chronospecies, the time of the disappearance of H. erectus is a matter of contention. There are also several proposed subspecies with varying levels of recognition. The last known record of morphologically recognisable H. erectus are the Solo Man specimens from Java, around 117–108,000 years old.
context_section_description: Increasing brain size is often directly associated with a meatier diet and resultant higher caloric intake. However, it is also plausible that the energy-expensive guts decreased in size in H. erectus, because the large ape gut is used to synthesize fat by fermenting plant matter which was replaced by dietary animal fat, allowing more energy to be diverted to brain growth. This would have increased brain size indirectly while maintaining the same caloric requirements of ancestor species. H. erectus may have also been the first to use a hunting and gathering food collecting strategy as a response to the increasing dependence on meat. With an emphasis on teamwork, division of labor, and food sharing, hunting and gathering was a dramatically different subsistence strategy from previous modes.
  H. erectus sites frequently are associated with assemblages of medium- to large-sized game, namely elephants, rhinos, hippos, bovine, and boar. H. erectus would have had considerable leftovers, potentially pointing to food sharing or long-term food preservation (such as by drying) if most of the kill was indeed utilized. It is possible that H. erectus grew to become quite dependent on large-animal meat, and the disappearance of H. erectus from the Levant is correlated with the local extinction of the straight-tusked elephant. Nonetheless, H. erectus diet likely varied widely depending upon location. For example, at the 780 ka Gesher Benot Ya‘aqov site, Israel, the inhabitants gathered and ate 55 different types of fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and tubers, and it appears that they used fire to roast certain plant materials that otherwise would have been inedible; they also consumed amphibians, reptiles, birds, aquatic and terrestrial invertebrates, in addition to the usual large creatures such as elephant and fallow deer. At the 1.95 Ma FwJJ20 lakeside site in the East Turkana Basin, Kenya, the inhabitants ate (alongside the usual bovids, hippos, and rhinos) aquatic creatures such as turtles, crocodiles, and catfish. The large animals were likely scavenged at this site, but the turtles and fish were possibly collected live. At the 1.5 Ma Trinil H. K. site, Java, H. erectus likely gathered fish and shellfish.
  Dentally, H. erectus mouths were not as versatile as those of ancestor species, capable of processing a narrower range of foods. However, tools were likely used to process hard foods, thus affecting the chewing apparatus, and this combination may have instead increased dietary flexibility (though this does not equate to a highly varied diet). Such versatility may have permitted H. erectus to inhabit a range of different environments, and migrate beyond Africa. 
  In 1999, British anthropologist Richard Wrangham proposed the "cooking hypothesis" which states that H. erectus speciated from the ancestral H. habilis because of fire usage and cooking 2 mya to explain the rapid doubling of brain size between these two species in only a 500,000 year timespan, and the sudden appearance of the typical human body plan. Cooking makes protein more easily digestible, speeds up nutrient absorption, and destroys food-borne pathogens, which would have increased the environment's natural carrying capacity, allowing group size to expand, causing selective pressure for sociality, requiring greater brain function. However, the fossil record does not associate the emergence of H. erectus with fire usage nor with any technological breakthrough for that matter, and cooking likely did not become a common practice until after 400 kya.
caption: H. erectus ate primarily large game, such as the straight-tusked elephant (above)
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