structural:scholar_edition
Naming

Similarities between Java Man and Peking Man led Ernst Mayr to rename both as Homo erectus in 1950. Throughout much of the 20th century, anthropologists debated the role of H. erectus in human evolution. Early in the century, due in part to the discoveries at Java and Zhoukoudian, the belief that modern humans first evolved in Asia was widely accepted. A few naturalists— Charles Darwin the most prominent among them—theorized that humans' earliest ancestors were African. Darwin had pointed out that chimpanzees and gorillas, humans ' closest relatives, evolved and exist only in Africa. Darwin did not include orangutans among the great apes of the Old World, likely because he thought of orangutans as primitive humans rather than apes. While Darwin considered Africa as the most probable birthplace of human ancestors, he also made the following statement about the geographic location of human origins in his book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex: "... it is useless to speculate on this subject; for two or three anthropomorphous apes, one the Dryopithecus …, existed in Europe during the Miocene age; and since so remote a period the earth has certainly undergone many great revolutions, and there has been ample time for migration on the largest scale." (1889, pp. 155–156).