Homo erectus ( 拉丁语）意为 upright man 直立人。 直立人是一种已经灭绝的更新世古人类，最早出现在约190-150万年前。直立人是第一个遍布欧亚大陆的人类祖先，其大陆范围从伊比利亚半岛延伸到爪哇岛。
非洲直立人可能是几个人类物种的祖先，如海德堡直立人和祖先直立人，而前者通常被认为是尼安德特人、丹尼索瓦人和现代人的祖先。直立人消失的时间是一个有争议的问题。还有几个被提出的亚种，它们的识别程度各不相同。最后已知的直立人是来自爪哇，大约在11.7 – 10.8万年前。
直立人是中等身材直立行走的人。脑壳较低，前额后退，鼻子、下巴和上颚宽大。与现代人类相比，他们的大脑更小，牙齿更大。直立人似乎是第一个能控制火的人类物种，大约在100万年前。这个人类物种似乎一直繁荣到大约20万年前。
About 1.5 million years BP Home erectus, a much more advanced creature than the great apes (australopithecus), wandered over vast distance, reaching China and Java in the east, and France, Spain, England at the other end of the continental land mass.
The tools he developed were so useful that they passed on almost unchanged for the longest period of human history and spread over all the inhabited world.
They were first unearthed by the eighteenth century antiquary John Frere (1740-1807), Fellow of Gaius College, Cambridge, and of the Royal Society, who had identified what proved to be a hand axe, the multi-purpose tool that enabled man to survive. ( The History of the World – Frank Welsh)