Homo erectus (meaning 'upright man') 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 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 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.