Homo erectus first arose about 1.6 million years ago and is believed to have lived for atleast 600,000 years at a time when the transition to Homo sapiens took place. The fosSil finds of Homo erectus indicate several first happenings in the human history. For the first time man became from being an opportunistic scavenger to a cooperative and big game hunter. For the first time he had come to know the use of fire. From being a mere stone scrapper, he became a systematic tool maker. There is evidence to indicate that he had home bases OF campsites from where he operated. And also for the first time we had such fossils from outside Africa, in Eurasia. Homo erectus variously named as Pithecanthropus, Sinanthropus and Atlanthropu.r, first appeared during the pleistocene interglacial period. Natural selection, it appears acted on specific characters which favoured the accumulated wisdom, such as increased body size, increased longivity, symbolic human-style culture, and loss of body heat. The cranial capacity of the pithecanthropine man ranged between 800 C.C. to 1125 C.C. (Fig. 14.9). The later populations of Homo erectus were known as cave man or ape man. The pithecanthropine fossils showed several characters which gave a fair picture of the primitive humans.