Sites where landmark early-human fossils were discovered

18 September 2026 · Explorer expedition

Five unpromising patches of ground — a quarried gorge, a riverbank, a limestone hill, a dry gully and a hole in the dolomite — where somebody picked up a bone that pushed the beginning of our story a very long way back.

The five stops

Stop 1 · Germany

Mettmann

The Kleine Feldhofer Grotte — on the Erkrath side of the Neandertal, a few kilometres from the town whose address the Neanderthal Museum carries — produced the type specimen of Homo neanderthalensis in 1856. It was not the first Neanderthal ever found (Engis in 1829 and Gibraltar in 1848 came earlier) but it was the one that named the species. Digs into the dumped quarry spoil in 1997 and 2000 recovered dozens more fragments, some of which refit the original skull.

Stop 2 · Indonesia

Trinil

Eugène Dubois found a molar and then a skullcap here in 1891 and the famous thigh bone in 1892, naming the creature Pithecanthropus erectus. 'Java Man' is now the type specimen of Homo erectus and was the first fossil human ancestor found anywhere outside Europe. The skullcap is in Leiden; a mussel shell from the same bone bed, scratched with a zigzag about half a million years ago, may be the oldest deliberate engraving known.

Stop 3 · China

Zhoukoudian

Dragon Bone Hill gave up the first Peking Man tooth to Otto Zdansky in 1921 and the first skullcap to Pei Wenzhong on 2 December 1929. It remains one of the richest Homo erectus sites anywhere and was inscribed by UNESCO in 1987 — but the original fossils were lost in December 1941 and have never been found.

Stop 4 · Ethiopia

Hadar

Donald Johanson and Tom Gray found AL 288-1 — Lucy, an Australopithecus afarensis roughly 3.2 million years old — in the Afar badlands on 24 November 1974. Her knee and pelvis showed she walked upright, settling that bipedalism came long before a big brain. Her Amharic name, Dinkinesh, means 'you are marvellous'.

Stop 5 · South Africa

Sterkfontein

Robert Broom and John Robinson recovered 'Mrs Ples', a near-complete Australopithecus africanus skull, here on 18 April 1947. Ron Clarke's 'Little Foot' — first spotted as loose foot bones in a storeroom, then traced to the Silberberg Grotto in 1997 — took two decades to chisel free and is the most complete australopithecine skeleton ever found.

Think you'd have found them? Play today's expedition, or replay this one from the archive.