Lantian Man (simplified Chinese: 蓝田人; traditional Chinese: 藍田人; pinyin: Lántián rén), 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.

This makes Lantian Man the second-oldest firmly dated H. erectus beyond Africa (after H. e. georgicus), and the oldest in East Asia.

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.

[1] 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,[3] at the Gongwangling site at the foothills of the Qinling Mountains.

[7] In 1978, Chinese palaeoanthropologist Ma Xinghua and colleagues estimated, respectively, 650,000 and 750 to 800 thousand years ago using palaeomagnetism, extending into the Early Pleistocene.

[2] In 2011, Indonesian palaeoanthropologist Yahdi Zaim and colleagues suggested the open habitats of China and Southeast Asia were colonised by two distinct waves of H. erectus based on dental anatomy,[12] separated by a rainforest belt south of the Qinling Mountains.

Based on the size and wearing of the molars (and assuming they degrade faster than those of modern humans), Woo estimated the individual was a 30 year old female.

[15] Like Peking Man, the brow ridge is a solid, continuous bar; the forehead is low and receding; and there may have been a sagittal keel running across the midline, but the region is too eroded to definitively tell.

Gongwangling sits at the base of the Qinling Mountains, which today is a natural barrier separating northern and southern China, forming plains to the north and forest to the south, but at the time may not have posed such an insurmountable wall.

Other forest-going creatures (not typical of the south) are: the Etruscan bear, the pig Sus lydekker, and the deer Cervus grayi and Sinomegaceros konwanlinensis.

More common were grassland and open-habitat creatures including: badgers, the giant hyena Pachycrocuta, the Zhoukoudian wolf, the tiger, the leopard, the cheetah-like Sivapanthera, the saber-toothed Megantereon, the horse Equus sanmemiensis, the rhino Dicerorhinus, the bovid Leptobos, and several northerly rodents.

As Chinese archaeology progressed through the 1980s, characteristically Acheulean tools were uncovered in China (including Lantian), and the strict Movius Line fell apart.

[17] In 2018, Zhu and colleagues reported 2.1 million year old stone tools at the Shangchen site on the Loess Plateau, the oldest evidence of humans out of Africa.

In total, the Early to Middle Pleistocene assemblage comprise largely heavy-duty tools including choppers, handaxes, picks, cleavers, spheroids, and heavy-duty scrapers made of predominantly local river cobble — quartzite, quartz, greywacke, and igneous pebbles — and more rarely higher quality sandstone, limestone, and chert.

Handaxes, cleavers, and picks are characteristic of the Acheulean, which seems to have prevailed for some time in this region even while the west was transitioning to the Middle Stone Age/Middle Paleolithic in the Late Pleistocene.