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The first species to be recognised as being distinctly human appeared in Africa just under 2 million years ago. It was classified at first as Homo erectus because it was similar to fossils identified previously in Asia by that name, but it later became known as Homo ergaster meaning ‘workman’ to distinguish its African origin. Palaeontologists agreed in the 1990s that there was sufficient difference between erectus and ergaster specimens to accord ergaster its own species designation; ergaster had a rounder head and thinner cranial vault bones, features that were passed down the line towards Homo sapiens. Some palaeoanthropologists, however, continued to refer to the species as ‘early African Homo erectus’.

Homo ergaster occurs in the fossil record between 1.9 and 1.5 million years ago. Its prize example is Turkana Boy, the well-preserved skeleton of an adolescent found by Kamoya Kimeu in northern Kenya in 1984, which is dated as about 1.6 million years old. Turkana Boy had the build and body proportions of a modern human: He was tall, long-legged and slender, with narrow hips and shoulders, well adapted for long-distance walking on the savannah; his forearms were short and his fingers were no longer hooked. He had far less body hair than his hominid ancestors. His braincase, however, was small. If he had reached adulthood, his brain size would have been about 880 cubic centimetres, twice the size of an australopithecine brain, but only about two-thirds the size of a modern human brain.

The achievements of Homo ergaster were remarkable. Taking advantage of their new striding gait, groups of ergaster slowly expanded from their home base in eastern Africa into other areas of Africa and then beyond. A collection of hominid fossils and Oldowan stone tools found in Dmanisi in Georgia in the 1990s indicate that by 1.8 million years ago, they had reached the Caucasus. Other groups—the forerunners of Homo erectus—made their way to East Asia. Stone tools and fossils from China and Indonesia suggest they arrived there about 1.7 million years ago.

The first immigrants to reach western Europe from Africa travelled there via the Levant, the lands of the eastern Mediterranean. The earliest evidence of their existence comes from two sites in the mountains of northern Spain. In the mid-1990s, a team of Spanish archaeologists exploring the Gran Dolina site in the Sierra Atapuerca region, east of Burgos, uncovered the bones of six individuals dated at around 780,000 years old. Some features appear to link the individuals to Homo ergaster, but facial bones—in the shape of the nose and cheekbones—look more modern. The Spanish team therefore proposed an entirely new species of human that they called Homo antecessor, or

‘Pioneer Man’. In 2007, the same team exploring a nearby cave came across another hominid fossil—a piece of jawbone with a few teeth attached—that was dated as 1.2 million years old. The first evidence of human settlement in Britain—flint tools found in Norfolk—dates back to the same period—between 950,000 and 800,000 years ago. But the attempt at colonisation ultimately failed, probably as a result of one of the severe glacial episodes that gripped Europe between 800,000 and 600,000 years ago.

Not only were early Africans adept at exploring new terrain, but they eventually devised more advanced techniques for manufacturing tools. Initially, for a period of several hundred thousand years, they relied on the same Oldowan technology that their ancestors had used as far back as 2.6 million years ago, turning out simple stone-flake tools for cutting purposes. But before fading from the African scene, Homo ergaster developed distinctive pear-shaped hand-axes, worked symmetrically on both sides, and pointed at one end, rounded at the other. The first evidence in Africa of this new technology was discovered during an expedition that Louis Leakey mounted in Kenya in 1928. Hand-axes had previously been identified by archaeologists working at a site at Saint Acheul near Amiens