João Zilhão

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João Zilhão (born January 15, 1957 in Lisbon ) is a Portuguese paleoanthropologist and has been a professor at the Faculty of Geography and History at the University of Barcelona since 2011 . Zilhão became internationally known as an explorer of the Neanderthals .

Life

João Zilhão spent his childhood and youth in Lisbon; his father was an engineer , his mother a psychiatrist . As a youth he joined the opposition to the 1974 dictatorship of the Portuguese Estado Novo . Together with other young people a " caving belonged to his school -M", explored various Zilhão already the age of fourteen caves on the outskirts of Lisbon. This also included the Galeria da Cisterna , a system of karst caves near Torres Novas . There, as a student, he discovered 7,500-year-old legacies of the oldest agricultural community in Portugal and in 1989 - in a hitherto unknown cave, now called Gruta da Oliveira - remains of one of the last Neanderthal groups, which were 65,000 to 35,000 years old have been dated; from 2005 to 2008 he led excavations there again.

Since there was no archeology course for first-year students in Portugal in the mid-1970s , João Zilhão initially enrolled in economics at the University of Lisbon, but soon switched to history. He spent the summer holidays as a volunteer at archaeological excavations in Portugal and France , bridging the time until he could devote himself to the study of archeology after completing his degree in history (1982, comparable to the Magister degree). In 1988 he acquired a further academic degree in the field of Prehistory ("Aprovado em Provas de Aptidão Pedagógica e Capacidade Científica") and finally in November 1995 the doctorate with a 1200-page synopsis of the known facts about the Upper Palaeolithic in Portugal ("O Paleolítico Superior da Estremadura portuguesa ").

After Zilhão was temporarily employed in Lisbon as a history teacher at a grammar school (1983/84) and as an employee of the Museu Nacional de Arqueologia (1982-1984), he was employed from 1988 as a research assistant in the history department of the University of Lisbon and there in 1995, after Completion of his doctoral thesis , appointed assistant professor. In 1996 he moved to the Parque Arqueológico do Vale do Côa as founding director , after he had previously campaigned heavily to ensure that the Côa valley was not flooded by building a dam and destroying the petroglyphs there. In 1997 he became director general of the Instituto Português de Arqueologia , an institution of the national ministry of culture . In 2002 João Zilhão returned to the University of Lisbon as a professor, and from 2005 to 2010 he taught and researched in England as a professor at the University of Bristol . In 2011 he moved to Spain and is now professor at the Faculty of Geography and History at the University of Barcelona and is a member of the Catalan Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats).

Research topics

As early as 1989, João Zilhão discovered stone tools , fireplaces and fossils from the late Neanderthal period in the Gruta da Oliveira . But it is only since 1996 that he has been dealing more intensively with their archaeological culture . The trigger was a publication by Jean-Jacques Hublin on Neanderthal finds from Arcy-sur-Cure ( France ), in which it was argued, among other things, that the archaeological culture of Châtelperronia can be assigned to the Neanderthals, the approach observed in this culture, for example, to theirs Jewelery from the legacies of the Cro-Magnon people ( Homo sapiens ) is presumably not an independent achievement of the Neanderthals, but evidence of the cultural influence of the Neanderthals by the Cro-Magnon people. Zilhão felt this interpretation as an expression of bias and argued together with some colleagues in a detailed technical article in 1998 against Hublin's assumptions; they were of the opinion that the Neanderthals developed the culture of Châtelperronien on their own.

In the following years, Zilhão took up the arguments of the American anthropologist Erik Trinkaus , who interpreted numerous hominine fossils from Europe as presumed hybrids between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans, for example bone finds from the Romanian karst caves Peştera cu oase and Peştera Muierii . Since then, Zilhão has been of the opinion "that Neanderthals and modern humans are the same species and mixed intensely." Together with Trinkaus, Zilhão also repeatedly attributed characteristics of a mixed race to the child of Lagar Velho from Portugal; However, their interpretations were massively contradicted as early as 1999 - in the same edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) as their first publication on Lagar Velho's child - and the interpretations are still considered controversial. Because the reconstruction of the Neanderthal DNA did provide indications of a gene flow of Neanderthal DNA into the population of anatomically modern humans, however, according to other publications, this gene flow occurred at a time when there were no anatomically modern humans in Europe.

Among the internationally acclaimed finds by João Zilhão are the jewelery and pigment remains of Neanderthals from the Cueva Antón and the Cueva de los Aviones , which are unique in Europe .

Fonts (selection)

  • with Francesco d'Errico: The Chronology and Taphonomy of the Earliest Aurignacian and Its Implications for the Understanding of Neandertal Extinction. In: Journal of World Prehistory. Volume 13, No. 1, 1999, pp. 1-68, doi: 10.1023 / A: 1022348410845
  • Neandertals and moderns mixed, and it matters. In: Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews. Volume 15, No. 5, 2006, pp. 183-195, doi: 10.1002 / evan.20110
  • The Emergence of Ornaments and Art: An Archaeological Perspective on the Origins of "Behavioral Modernity". In: Journal of Archaeological Research. Volume 15, No. 1, 2007, pp. 1-54, doi: 10.1007 / s10814-006-9008-1

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Curriculum Vitae João Zilhão. (PDF) At: icrea.cat , accessed on April 19, 2018
  2. ↑ a b c Michael Balter: Neandertal Champion Defends the Reputation of Our Closest Cousins. In: Science . Volume 337, No. 6095, 2012, pp. 642-643, doi: 10.1126 / science.337.6095.642
  3. ^ Diego E. Angelucci and João Zilhão: Stratigraphy and formation processes of the Upper Pleistocene deposit at Gruta da Oliveira, Almonda karstic system, Torres Novas, Portugal. In: Geoarchaeology. Volume 24, No. 3, 2009, pp. 277–310, doi: 10.1002 / gea.20267
    John C. Willman, Julia Maki, Priscilla Bayle, Erik Trinkaus and João Zilhão: Middle Paleolithic human remains from the Gruta Da Oliveira (Torres Novas), Portugal . In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Volume 149, No. 1, 2012, pp. 39-51, doi: 10.1002 / ajpa.22091
  4. ^ Jean-Jacques Hublin et al .: A late Neanderthal associated with Upper Palaeolithic artefacts. In: Nature. Volume 381, 1996, pp. 224-226, doi: 10.1038 / 381224a0
  5. ↑ Francesco d'Errico, João Zilhão et al .: Neanderthal Acculturation in Western Europe? A Critical Review of the Evidence and its Interpretation. In: Current Anthropology Volume 39 (Supplement S1), 1998, SS 1–44, doi: 10.1086 / 204689 , full text (PDF; 1.3 MB)
  6. ^ Erik Trinkaus et al .: An early modern human from the Peştera cu Oase, Romania. In: PNAS . Volume 100, No. 20, 2003, pp. 11231-11236, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.2035108100
  7. ↑ Andrei Soficaru, Adrian Doboş and Erik Trinkaus: Early modern humans from the Peştera Muierilor, Baia de Fier, Romania. In: PNAS. Volume 103, No. 46, 2006, pp. 17196-17201, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0608443103
  8. ↑ Cidália Duarte, João Maurício, Paul B. Pettitt , Pedro Souto, Erik Trinkaus, Hans van der Plicht and João Zilhão: The early Upper Paleolithic human skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho (Portugal) and modern human emergence in Iberia. In: PNAS. Volume 96, No. 13, 1999, pp. 7604-7609, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.96.13.7604
  9. ↑ João Zilhão, Erik Trinkaus (Ed.): Portrait of the Artist as a Child. The Gravettian Human Skeleton from the Abrigo do Lagar Velho and its Archaeological Context. In: Trabalhos de Arqueologia. Volume 22, Instituto Português de Arqueologia, Lisboa 2002, ISBN 972-8662-07-6 , full text (PDF; 50.8 MB)
  10. ↑ Priscilla Bayle, Roberto Macchiarelli, Erik Trinkaus, Cidália Duarte, Arnaud Mazurier and João Zilhão: Dental maturational sequence and dental tissue proportions in the early Upper Paleolithic child from Abrigo do Lagar Velho, Portugal. In: PNAS. Volume 107, No. 4, 2010, pp. 1338–1342, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0914202107 , full text (PDF; 291 kB)
  11. ↑ Ian Tattersall , Jeffrey H. Schwartz : Hominids and hybrids: The place of Neanderthals in human evolution. In: PNAS. Volume 96, No. 13, 1999, pp. 7117–7119, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.96.13.7117 , full text (PDF)
  12. ^ Human evolution: Alleged evidence of mating with Neanderthals. On: spiegel.de of October 31, 2006
  13. ↑ Richard E. Green et al .: A draft sequence of the Neandertal Genome. In: Science. Volume 328, No. 5979, 2010, pp. 710–722, doi: 10.1126 / science.1188021 PDF
  14. ↑ Sriram Sankararaman et al .: The Date of Interbreeding between Neandertals and Modern Humans. In: PLoS Genetics. Volume 8, No. 10, 2012: e1002947, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pgen.1002947
  15. ↑ João Zilhão et al .: Symbolic use of marine shells and mineral pigments by Iberian Neandertals. In: PNAS. Volume 107, No. 3, 2010, pp. 1023-1028, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0914088107
    An article on heise.de (“Big brain and more intelligent than thought”) from January 11, 2010 contains two images from PNAS.
  16. ↑ Michael Balter: Neandertal Jewelry Shows Their Symbolic Smarts. In: Science. Volume 327, 2010, pp. 255-256, doi: 10.1126 / science.327.5963.255
personal data
SURNAME Zilhão, João
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Zilhão, João Carlos Teiga
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Portuguese paleoanthropologist and professor at the University of Barcelona
DATE OF BIRTH January 15, 1957
PLACE OF BIRTH Lisbon