New research suggests that early humans had the ability to thrive in a desert, indicating that they were more adaptable to extreme environments than previously thought.

Homo erectus lived in East Africa, which became a dry, barren landscape. Yet, the hominin species managed to survive.

H. erectus is an extinct species of early human that emerged about two million years ago in Africa. They walked upright with longer legs and shorter arms than previous hominins.

They also had bigger brains, although their brains weren't quite as large as the brains of today's humans, Homo sapiens.

For more than 1.5 million years, H. erectus persisted until they went extinct around 100,000 years ago. It was one of the first early human species to leave Africa and travel to faraway regions like China and Indonesia.

Overall, the species existed on Earth for much longer than modern humans have so far. H. sapiens only appeared 300,000 years ago.

Researchers have wondered how H. erectus was able to survive for such a long period of time and inhabit such a broad expanse of land.

According to a new study, "ecological flexibility" may be the answer. A team of scientists from multiple institutions around the world reached this conclusion after examining a site located in northern Tanzania called Engaji Nanyori.

The site contains many fossils belonging to H. erectus, as well as stone tools, preserved pollen grains, and butchered animal bones.

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The researchers analyzed these artifacts with great care to create a rough picture of what the past environment looked like.

They found that Engaji Nanyori was a dry, semi-desert environment with few plants and little water available. However, the landscape wasn't always that way. For hundreds of thousands of years, it was an open woodland.

About a million years ago, the climate shifted significantly, causing Engaji Nanyori to go from a hospitable habitat to a dry, shrubby land.

H. erectus managed to adjust to the new landscape somehow. The early humans visited water holes that appeared after it rained and hunted the animals that gathered to drink from them.

Over millennia, they continued inhabiting the same sites near streams and rivers. They also made their stone tools sharper for butchering animals.

When they moved to new locations, they brought the tools with them. These new and improved tools would have helped hunt prey and scavenge carcasses.

"They may have had strategies where they basically say, 'This is a good tool. I should bring it with me and be ready if we find food," said Paul Durkin, a co-author of the study and a geologist at the University of Manitoba in Canada.

H. erectus's adaptability could explain why it could move out of Africa and travel to other parts of the world successfully.

The findings show that H. sapiens was not the only hominin species that was capable of living in extreme environments.