Erik Trinkaus

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Erik Trinkaus (born December 24, 1948 ) is an American paleoanthropologist and since 1997 professor of anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis . Trinkaus became internationally known for his hypotheses on the relationship between Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ).

Life

Erik Trinkaus studied from 1966 to the acquisition of the Bachelor degree in 1970 at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and thereafter until 1975 at the University of Pennsylvania , where he received the Magister degree in 1973 with a thesis on A Review of the Reconstructions and Evolutionary Significance of the Fontéchevade Fossils ( Fontéchevade is a Paleolithic site in France) and obtained a doctorate degree in 1975 with a dissertation on A Functional Analysis of the Neandertal Foot .

From 1975 to 1983 Trinkaus worked as a research assistant in the department of anthropology at Harvard University . In 1983 he moved to the University of New Mexico in the same function , where he was appointed professor in 1987 and remained active until 1997. He then acquired a professorship in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis , where he has been the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of Anthropology since 2002 .

Trinkaus has been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1996 and of the Academy of Science of Saint Louis since 2001 .

research

Erik Trinkaus researches in particular fossils from the era around 40,000 years ago when the Neanderthals died out in Europe and the anatomically modern humans (the Cro-Magnon humans ) immigrated from the east. He is also concerned with the evolution of the anatomical features of the genus Homo .

Erik Trinkaus became known beyond his circle of specialist colleagues because he 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 oasis (the lower jaw oasis 1 ) and Peştera Muierii . Together with João Zilhão , he takes the view that Neanderthals and modern humans often mated. Together with Zilhão, Trinkaus repeatedly ascribed 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. Although the reconstruction of Neanderthal DNA in 2010 also provided indications of a - low - gene flow of Neanderthal DNA into the anatomically modern human population, according to other publications this gene flow occurred at a point in time when there was no anatomical one in Europe modern people lived.

A DNA analysis of the lower jaw Oase 1 in 2015 showed, however, that at least the young man from whom this jaw came was actually the descendant of a mongrel: 4.8 to 11.3 percent of his genome was identified as being of Neanderthal man interpreted. However, it has also been proven that the DNA segments from anatomically modern humans are more similar to fossil finds from Asia and not to later finds from Europe or to humans living today; from this it was deduced that the population to which Oasis 1 belonged represented a “dead end”, whose genes did not enter today's population of Homo sapiens .

As an expert on fossils of the archaic Homo sapiens and especially his foot bones, Trinkaus also examined finds from Chinese excavation sites - for example from Zhirendong and the fossil Tianyuan 1 - and interpreted them like his Chinese colleagues in terms of the hypothesis of the multiregional origin of modern humans .

Fonts (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Washington University, Department of Anthropology ( Memento from February 26, 2012 in the Internet Archive ): Curriculum vitae Erik Trinkaus. Viewed February 7, 2013
  2. ^ 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
  3. ↑ 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
  4. ↑ Adrian Doboş, Andrei Soficaru and Erik Trinkaus: The prehistory and paleontology of the Peştera Muierilor (Romania). In: Études et Recherches Archéologiques de l'Université de Liège. Volume 124, 2010, pp. 1–125
  5. ↑ 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
  6. ↑ 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; 48.4 MB)
  7. ↑ 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; 284 kB)
  8. ↑ 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)
  9. ^ Human evolution: Alleged evidence of mating with Neanderthals. On: spiegel.de of October 31, 2006
  10. ↑ 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
  11. ↑ 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
  12. ^ Ann Gibbons: Ancient DNA pinpoints Paleolithic liaison in Europe. In: Science. Volume 348, No. 6237, 2015, p. 847, doi: 10.1126 / science.348.6237.847
  13. ↑ Ewen Callaway: Early European may have had Neanderthal great-great-grandparent. On: nature.com from May 13, 2015, full text
  14. ^ Wu Liu, Erik Trinkaus et al .: Human remains from Zhirendong, South China, and modern human emergence in East Asia. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , Volume 107, No. 45, 2010, pp. 19201–19206, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.1014386107 (freely accessible as full text)
  15. ↑ Erik Trinkaus, Hong Shang: Anatomical evidence for the antiquity of human footwear: Tianyuan and Sunghir. In: Journal of Archaeological Science. Volume 35, No. 7, 2008, pp. 1928-1933, doi: 10.1016 / j.jas.2007.12.002
personal data
SURNAME Trinkaus, Erik
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleoanthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 24, 1948