In 1907, workers at a sandpit near the town of Mauer outside Heidelberg in Germany unearthed a thick, toothless lower jaw. Otto Schoetensack named it Homo heidelbergensis the following year. Since then, fossils of the same type have been found in Europe (Atapuerca in Spain, Boxgrove in England, Bilzingsleben in Germany), Africa (Kabwe in Zambia, Bodo in Ethiopia), and possibly China.

Heidelbergensis inherited heavy brow ridges from Homo erectus but had a substantially larger brain — roughly 1,100–1,400 cm³, overlapping the modern human range. They stood 1.7–1.8 m tall and were heavily built. They produced refined Acheulean handaxes, and the 400,000-year-old wooden spears found at Schöningen in Germany are usually attributed to them — clear evidence of organised long-distance hunting.

The current consensus picture from fossils and ancient DNA: roughly 700,000 years ago, an African population of heidelbergensis split from European populations that had crossed into Eurasia. The Eurasian branch gave rise to Neanderthals and their sister population, the Denisovans; the African branch led to Homo sapiens. There is dispute: some palaeoanthropologists treat heidelbergensis as an umbrella taxon and prefer to split African and European specimens into separate species. The broad framework — two main lineages diverging here — is widely accepted.

At Atapuerca in Spain, the Sima de los Huesos ("Pit of Bones") contains the remains of at least 28 individuals; the bodies seem to have been intentionally thrown into a cave shaft, possibly the earliest hint of mortuary behaviour. If real, it suggests that these beings already had some concept of death — the beginning of a cognitive world of symbols.