Homo cepranensis

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View of the skull from above;
View of the right side (the bulge above the eye is clearly visible on the right );
View from behind

As homo cepranensis ( "Ceprano-man") of the Fund is one of its discoverers hominid cranium indicated that in March 1994 in Italy was salvaged. The archaeologist Italo Biddittu, who discovered the fossil in the Campogrande area , named the epithet after the town of Ceprano in the province of Frosinone, south of Rome , near the site . The fossil was found in a layer of clay during road construction work and was crushed into around 50 fragments by the excavator.

The roof of the skull has not yet been reliably dated. The clay layer from which it was recovered was assigned an upper age limit of approx. 880,000 years and a lower age of approx. 460,000 years; in the specialist publications of the Italian paleoanthropologists, an age beyond 700,000 years is usually mentioned. The features of the skullcap and its presumed age suggest a proximity to Homo erectus ; However, a proximity to the finds from Spain, probably the same old, known as Homo antecessor is not excluded .

The “Ceprano Man” is a single find. The name Homo cepranensis is - similar to Homo steinheimensis - to be understood as a mere reference to the place where the fossil was found, but does not identify a species , i.e. it is not a taxon .

literature

  • Giorgio Manzi: Before the Emergence of Homo sapiens: Overview on the Early-to-Middle Pleistocene Fossil Record (with a Proposal about Homo heidelbergensis at the subspecific level). In: International Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Volume 2011, 2011, doi : 10.4061 / 2011/582678 (full text freely accessible)
  • W. Henry Gilbert, Tim White and Berhane Asfaw : Homo erectus, Homo ergaster, Homo "cepranensis" and the Daka cranium . In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 45, No. 3, 2003, pp. 255-259, doi : 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2003.08.007

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Francesco Mallegni, Emiliano Carnieri, Michelangelo Bisconti, Giandonato Tartarelli, Stefano Ricci, Italo Biddittu and Aldo Segre: Homo cepranensis sp. nov. and the evolution of African-European Middle Pleistocene hominids . In: Comptes Rendus Palevol , Volume 2 (2), March 2003, pp. 153-159, doi : 10.1016 / S1631-0683 (03) 00015-0
  2. ↑ Gary J. Sawyer, Viktor Deak: The Long Way to Man. Life pictures from 7 million years of evolution. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2008, p. 155
  3. ^ G. Manzi et al .: A cranium for the earliest Europeans: Phylogenetic position of the hominid from Ceprano, Italy. In: PNAS , Volume 98, No. 17, 2001, pp. 10011-10016, doi : 10.1073 / pnas.151259998
  4. ↑ Ronald J. Clarke : A corrected reconstruction and interpretation of the Homo erectus calvaria from Ceprano, Italy. In: Journal of Human Evolution , Volume 39, No. 4, 2000, pp. 433-442, doi : 10.1006 / jhev.2000.0426
  5. ^ A. Ascenzi et al.: A re-appraisal of Ceprano calvaria affinities with Homo erectus, after the new reconstruction. In: Journal of Human Evolution , Volume 39, No. 4, 2000, pp. 443-450, doi : 10.1006 / jhev.2000.0425
  6. ↑ Bernard Wood , Nicholas Lonergan: The hominin fossil record: taxa, grades and clades. In: Journal of Anatomy , Volume 212, No. 4, 2008, p. 362, DOI: 10.1111 / j.1469-7580.2008.00871.x , full text (PDF; 292 kB) ( Memento from October 20, 2012 in the Internet Archive )