Hand Axes & Clevers
Species - Homo Erectus, Homo Antecessor, Homo Heidelbergensis
Age - 750,000 - 250,000 Years Old
Period - Mid to Late Acheulean
Discovered - Africa
 
** Acheulean **
Acheulean, from the French acheuléen after the type site of Saint-Acheul, is an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by distinctive oval and pear-shaped "hand-axes" associated with Homo erectus and derived species such as Homo heidelbergensis.
 
** Homo Erectus **
Homo erectus is an extinct species of archaic human from the Pleistocene, with its earliest occurrence about 2 million years ago, 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 ancestors to several human species, such as H. heidelbergensis and H. antecessor, with the former generally considered to have been the ancestor to Neanderthals and Denisovans, and sometimes also modern humans. Asian populations of H. erectus may be 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 ago.
 
** Homo Heidelbergensis **
Homo heidelbergensis is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human which existed during the Middle Pleistocene. It was subsumed as a subspecies of H. erectus in 1950 as H. e. heidelbergensis, but towards the end of the century, it was more widely classified as its own species. It is debated whether or not to constrain H. heidelbergensis to only Europe or to also include African and Asian specimens, and this is further confounded by the type specimen being a jawbone, because jawbones feature few diagnostic traits and are generally missing among Middle Pleistocene specimens. Thus, it is debated if some of these specimens could be split off into their own species or a subspecies of H. erectus. Because the classification is so disputed, the Middle Pleistocene is often called the "muddle in the middle".
 
** Homor Antecessor **
Homo antecessor is an archaic human species of the Lower Paleolithic, known to have been present in Spain, and possibly England and France, between about 1.2 million and 0.8 million years ago. It was described in 1997 by Eudald Carbonell, Juan Luis Arsuaga and José María Bermúdez de Castro, who based on its "unique mix of modern and primitive traits" classified it as a previously unknown archaic human species.
 
* Please Note; The information displayed with each EARLY MAN artifact is the only information that we have available. These hand axes were discovered among other axes and tools by experts and researchers. The exact location is unknown.