H. heidelbergensis

Evolution

H. heidelbergensis is thought to have descended from African H. erectus — sometimes classified as H. ergaster. The exact derivation from an ancestor species is obfuscated by a long gap in the human fossil record near the end of the Early Pleistocene. In 2016, Italian anthropologist Antonio Profico and colleagues suggested that 875,000 year old skull material from the Gombore II site of the Melka Kunture Formation, Ethiopia, represents a transitional morph between H. ergaster and H. heidelbergensis, and thus postulated that H. heidelbergensis originated in Africa. A 2023 genetic study of 3,000 people found that the global population was reduced to less than 1,300 individuals between 800,000 and 900,000 years ago. This extreme population bottleneck could have caused the divergence of H. heidelbergensis.