There is great debate as to whether Homo ergaster and Homo erectus are one species or two. Some refer to H. ergaster as the “early” H. erectus. Their differences are largely geographical: H. ergaster is associated with Africa and H. erectus with Asia. Yet some researchers have concluded that H. ergaster and even H. habilis should be referred to as H. erectus. Whether to lump or split the diverse species in the genus Homo is an ongoing challenge in the scientific community. While there are some anatomical differences between H. erectus and H. ergaster, they are fairly minimal.
The diversity and number of evolutionary changes seen in H. erectus indicate that H. erectus set the stage for the arrival of the archaic Homo, which we will cover in the next section.
The content of this course has been taken from the free Anthropology textbook by Openstax