Lantian Man (), Homo erectus lantianensis) is a subspecies of Homo erectus known from an almost complete mandible from Chenchiawo (陈家窝) Village discovered in 1963, and a partial skull from Gongwangling(公王岭) Village discovered in 1964, situated in Lantian County on the Loess Plateau. The former dates to about 710–684 thousand years ago, and the latter 1.65–1.59 million years ago. This makes Lantian Man the second-oldest firmly dated H. erectus beyond Africa (after H. e. georgicus), and the oldest in East Asia. The fossils were first described by Woo Ju-Kan in 1964, who considered the subspecies an ancestor to Peking Man (H. e. pekinensis). Like Peking Man, Lantian Man has a heavy brow ridge, a receding forehead, possibly a sagittal keel running across the midline of the skull, and exorbitantly thickened bone. The skull is small by absolute measure, and has narrower postorbital constriction. The teeth are proportionally large compared to other Asian H. erectus. The brain volume of the Gongwangling skull is about 780 cc, similar to contemporary archaic humans in Africa, but much smaller than later Asian H. erectus and modern humans. Lantian Man inhabited the mild grasslands at the northern base of the Qinling Mountains. For stone tools, Lantian Man manufactured mainly heavy-duty tools including choppers, spheroids, heavy-duty scrapers, handaxes, picks, cleavers. The latter three are characteristic of the Acheulean industry, which is usually only applied to African and Western Eurasian sites. It appears the Acheulean persisted far longer in this region than elsewhere. Taxonomy On July 19, 1963, a team funded by the Chinese Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology (IVPP) recovered a fossil human mandible (lower jawbone) outside Chenchiawo Village, Lantian County in the Shaanxi Province of Northwest China. It was found in the bottom end of a thick layer of reddish clays, atop a metre-thick (3 ft) layer of gravel. Lantian is situated on the Loess Plateau, which is geologically stratified into alternating units of loess (wind-blown sediment deposits) and paleosol (soil deposits). The mandible was formally described by Chinese palaeoanthropologist Woo Ju-Kan(吴汝康) in 1964, who noted its similarity to the Peking Man (at the time "Sinanthropus" pekinensis), and provisionally classified it as "Sinanthropus" lantianensis. This spurred further investigation of Lantian County, which recovered a human tooth by the end of the May 1964 and the rest of the skull by October, at the Gongwangling site at the foothills of the Qinling Mountains. Woo also