Dikika
Dikika is a paleoanthropological site on the Awash River in the Afar Triangle of Ethiopia . As a deposit of fossils Dikika since 1972 was due to observations of US geologists Jon Kalb known worldwide attention to her but was granted only after the spinal column, the well-preserved there in 2000 skeleton of a hominid was found. This fossil with the scientific name DIK 1-1 is considered to be the most complete specimen of the species Australopithecus afarensis to date ; it is also called Selam ("peace") by its discoverer .
In the vicinity of Dikika and the site of Hadar a little further north, numerous other fossils from the hominini were found: including the well-known Lucy and Ardi (a female Ardipithecus ramidus ). The oldest stone tools known to date, around 2.6 to 2.5 million years old, were also recovered in this area . The Afar triangle is therefore considered to be one of the cradles of humanity .
In summer 2010, an international research team led by the spinal column, reported by the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco and Shannon McPherron from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Nature about the discovery of 3.3 million-year-old alleged scratch and cut marks on fossil animal bones which have been interpreted to mean that Australopithecus afarensis was already scratching meat from rib and leg bones. However, this interpretation of the shavings is controversial because the shavings cannot be reliably distinguished from bite marks by crocodiles.
The Pliocene sediments near Dikika have been researched for several years by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology , among others .
See also
Web links
- Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology : Overview of the objectives of field research in Dikika (as of December 28, 2016)
- The first human scratch marks. (with images) On: welt.de from August 11, 2010
- Ancient animal and human bone cuts could be the work of crocodile teeth instead of early butchers. On: sciencemag.org of November 6, 2017, doi: 10.1126 / science.aar4226 (with illustration)
Individual evidence
- ^ Jon Kalb : Adventures in the Bone Trade. The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression. Copernicus Books, New York 2001, p. 57, ISBN 0-387-98742-8 .
- ↑ S. Semaw et al .: 2.5-million-year-old stone tools from Gona, Ethiopia. In: Nature . Volume 385, 1997, pp. 333-336, doi : 10.1038 / 385333a0
- ↑ Shannon P. McPherron et al .: Evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at Dikika. In: Nature. Volume 466, 2010, pp. 857-860, doi : 10.1038 / nature09248
- ↑ Yonatan Sahle, Sireen El Zaatari and Tim White : Hominid butchers and biting crocodiles in the African Pliocene-Pleistocene. In: PNAS . Volume 114, No. 50, 2017, pp. 13164-13169, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1716317114