Homo heidelbergensis

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Homo heidelbergensis
"Skull number 5" from the "Sima de los huesos" near Atapuerca

"Skull number 5" from the "Sima de los huesos" near Atapuerca

Temporal occurrence
Middle Pleistocene
Approx. 600,000 to 200,000 years
Locations
Systematics
Human (Hominoidea)
Apes (Hominidae)
Homininae
Hominini
homo
Homo heidelbergensis
Scientific name
Homo heidelbergensis
Schoetensack , 1908

Homo heidelbergensis ("Heidelberg man") is an extinct species of the genus Homo . In particular, fossils from the European Middle Pleistocene , which are 600,000 to 200,000 years old, are assigned tothis species.

Homo heidelbergensis emerged from Homo erectus and evolved into Neanderthal man ( Homo neanderthalensis ) in Europe about 200,000 years ago . Since there is no clear dividing line between Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis or Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals, the allocation of many finds to one or the other chronospecies is still controversial among paleoanthropologists - between so-called rags and splinters . Some researchers interpret some of the finds assigned to Homo heidelbergensis as mere variants of Homo erectus .

Naming

The lower jaw of Mauer (original)

The name of the genus Homo is derived from the Latin hŏmō [ ˈhɔmoː ] "man". The specific epithet heidelbergensis is reminiscent of the location of the type specimen near Heidelberg . Homo heidelbergensis thus means “Heidelberg man”.

When choosing the name Homo heidelbergensis , Schoetensack followed a tradition that the Irish geologist William King founded in 1864 after the discovery of fossil homo bones in a section of the Düssel valley called " Neandertal " ; he too had named a single “human skeleton” as a new species ( Homo neanderthalensis ). Such references to the location of individual fossils were chosen, for example, in the 1920s by Arthur Smith Woodward ( Homo rhodesiensis ) and Davidson Black ( Sinanthropus pekinensis ), in the 1930s by Fritz Berckhemer ( Homo steinheimensis ) and after repeated bone finds on Java in the 1940s -Years Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald ( Meganthropus paleojavanicus ); the youngest link in this chain of tradition is Homo floresiensis .

The name Homo heidelbergensis , however, remained - if at all - only related to the lower jaw of Mauer until the 1980s. This only changed after various other fossils of comparable age had been discovered and their anatomical similarity had been proven.

Phylogenetic tree of the genus Homo , in which a widespread distribution of Homo erectus is assumed. The most recent findings on the gene flow of Neanderthals to Homo sapiens are not taken into account here.
In 2012, Chris Stringer emphasized in his family tree hypothesis that he assumed the central position of Homo heidelbergensis as a link between Neanderthals , Denisovans and Homo sapiens ; other paleoanthropologists assign the African finds identified here as heidelbergensis to Homo erectus . On the far right, Stringer suggests that some genetic abnormalities have been detected in Africa that seem to indicate a third gene flow from a previously unexplained pre- human population to anatomically modern humans. In the Asian Homo erectus , Stringer emphasizes the separation into Peking man and Java man , and he interprets Homo antecessor as an early European branch of Homo erectus . The origin of Homo floresiensis is unclear.

The type specimen

The holotype of Homo heidelbergensis is the lower jaw of Mauer, which today is ascribed an age of 609,000 ± 40,000 years. This fossil was found on October 21, 1907 by the Leimen day laborer Daniel Hartmann while shoveling sand in a sand pit in the municipality of Mauer , and in 1908 Otto Schoetensack correctly described it as a “preneandertaloid”.

The lower jaw of Mauer is the oldest fossil of the genus Homo that has been recovered in Germany .

To distinguish it from other species of the genus Homo

In 1974 Chris Stringer recognized that the fossils Petralona 1 from Greece and Kabwe 1 from Zambia differ significantly from the Neanderthal finds. In 1981, two researchers analyzed the mammalian fossils from the layer of fossil Petralona 1, which could be assigned to the Cromer complex , and noticed that they had striking similarities with the mammals found in Mauer. In 1983 Chris Stringer finally published a study in which he identified various common features of the Petralona 1 skull ("Archanthropus europeaus petraloniensis"), the lower jaw of Mauer, the Arago XXI skull from France ( Homo erectus tautavelensis ) and the Broken Hill Skull ( Homo rhodesiensis ) pointed out. At the same time, Stringer expressed the assumption that these finds stand on the common basis of Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans . Therefore, they could be viewed as a separate species and referred to as Homo heidelbergensis - according to the convention that the oldest name is the valid one.

In the following years, some research groups questioned the previously internationally largely uniform species assignments of younger fossils to the genus Homo . On the one hand, this concerned the Neanderthals , who until then had been called Homo sapiens neanderthalensis and thus stood as a subspecies of Homo sapiens next to anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens sapiens ). The Neanderthals were now given the status of their own species ( Homo neanderthalensis ), as was modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) - a change in the naming conventions that became established internationally in the 1990s and was also due to the fact that otherwise the last common Ancestors of two subspecies already with the common species name (here: Homo sapiens ) should have been named. The differences between the Neanderthal and its ancestor species (later European Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis ) “are best interpreted as a change in a lineage over time. Some fragmentary finds (for example from Biache Saint-Vaast, Arrondissement Arras in France) can even easily be assigned to both species. "

At the same time, objections were initially expressed by US researchers in particular to the definition of the taxon Homo erectus , which had included finds from Asia, Africa and Europe since the 1950s, although the morphological characteristics of the African and European finds differed considerably from the characteristics of the Asian type specimen of the species Homo erectus differ. These researchers "split this comprehensive taxon out of chronological and geographical considerations"; Homo erectus has since been identified by these researchers as “a representative of a specifically East Asian lineage”. The oldest African fossils identified as Homo erectus by then are referred to by these researchers as Homo ergaster , the younger ones - for example the fossils from Kabwe, Petralona, ​​Arago and, according to Ian Tattersall , the Bodo skull from Ethiopia - as Homo heidelbergensis . According to this convention , Homo ergaster developed into Homo heidelbergensis in Africa , while groups of Homo ergaster that had emigrated from Africa to Asia developed into Homo erectus in Asia . This convention was proposed by Bernard Wood in 2008 and Ian Tattersall in 2015, who - like Chris Stringer 25 years earlier - interpreted Homo heidelbergensis as the last common ancestor of Homo neanderthalensis and Homo sapiens .

So far, however, not all researchers have subscribed to this convention, so that - depending on the preference of the individual authors - certain fossils are assigned to completely different species. It has even been argued that even this convention still bundles fossils that look far too different into one species. The British paleoanthropologist Leslie Aiello was quoted in the journal Science , for example , that the so defined Homo heidelbergensis is a "trash can taxon"; she proposed that the species Homo heidelbergensis be reserved for European fossils and that the African descendants of Homo ergaster be raised to a species that has not yet been established. Subsequently, among other things, it was proposed to split off the immediate ancestors of Homo sapiens discovered in Africa from Homo heidelbergensis and to designate them as Homo rhodesiensis , but this proposal has not yet been accepted internationally.

Above all, European, but also some US-American research groups are still - with minor modifications - that Homo erectus is a comprehensive taxon to which at least Asian and African fossils can be assigned. According to your interpretation of the previously known fossils, Homo erectus emerged in Africa from Homo ergaster and emigrated to both Asia and Europe. In Europe, the descendants of these emigrants eventually developed into Neanderthals.

Some of these researchers also referred to the finds of so-called pre-Neanderthals (= "pre-Neanderthals"; European fossils older than 200,000 years) as local, European subspecies of Homo erectus ; Examples of this are the names Homo erectus tautavelensis and Homo erectus bilzingslebensis . This assignment of the fossils meant that the lower jaw of Mauer was also referred to as Homo erectus heidelbergensis and therefore these researchers completely dispensed with the species name Homo heidelbergensis . Recently, however, the doctrine has become established among these researchers that the early European descendants of the African emigrants - and only these - are referred to as Homo heidelbergensis . This position can be seen, for example, in a database of the Human Evolution Research Center (Berkeley) which, in addition to a very old find from Israel, exclusively assigns European finds of the species Homo heidelbergensis . Nevertheless, the lower jaw of Mauer is still referred to as Homo erectus in the permanent exhibition of the Phyletic Museum in Jena .

features

skeleton

The lower jaw from Mauer and a matching upper jaw of another origin (replicas)

Most of the individual finds of Homo heidelbergensis are fragments of skulls and mandibles. The most informative finds - including 28 very completely preserved individuals - from the epoch of Homo heidelbergensis come from the Sima de los Huesos , a cave near Burgos in Spain . Their age was dated 430,000 years ago in 2014; significantly higher age information had been published previously. The Spanish explorers call at least the oldest finds from this cave - the age of which was estimated at "about 650,000 years" - as a separate species ( Homo antecessor ); however, this special position is not recognized internationally.

The skull Atapuerca-5 (“Miguelón”, see fig. In the head of the article), which is also assigned to Homo heidelbergensis by the Spanish paleoanthropologist Ana Gracia Téllez, is considered particularly telling . On it you can clearly see a continuous bulge above the eye sockets , which has a downward curve above the nose. Due to the wide bridge of the nose, the eye sockets are quite far apart. The nose and lower jaw protrude clearly - like a snout - in relation to the cheekbones. The forehead is lower than that of the later Neanderthals. Another characteristic of Homo heidelbergensis is a large upper and lower jaw, whereby - as with the type specimen from Mauer and with the Neanderthals - there was probably a gap behind the third molar, into which another tooth would have fit.

The mean brain volume of ten skulls discovered in Spain "is 1274 cm³ with a range of 1116 to 1450 cm³. It is therefore slightly smaller than in Neanderthals and modern humans. ”The bone structure below the neck, however, is so far only insufficiently known: Although numerous bone fragments have been recovered, no associated remains of a single individual have been described. Estimates based on 27 long bones from the Sima de los Huesos resulted in a height of approx. 164 cm for Homo heidelbergensis , whereby the men are likely to have been slightly larger than the women. The body weight is estimated at 60 to 80 kg. From 17 skull finds from the Sima de los Huesos it was also deduced that the teeth, the chewing apparatus and the facial bones of this Spanish population had the characteristic features of the later Neanderthals - much earlier than previously recorded elsewhere - while the skull capsule still had "primitive" features .

According to a review from 2010, it is also certain that the teeth and bones of the relatively delicate lower jaw fragment Arago XXIII from the cave of Arago share clear morphological features with the strong lower jaw of Mauer and that all finds from this cave represent a uniform hominine group. This means that the spread of Homo heidelbergensis over a large area of ​​Europe can be considered certain. In this study, however, it was also pointed out that not all fossils of this epoch share similarly clear characteristics with the holotype from Mauer. The variability of the anatomical features could also mean that between 600,000 and 300,000 before today, two homo- species could be defined.

Analysis of mitochondrial DNA

At the end of 2013, a genetic finding from Sima de los Huesos caused a stir . Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology succeeded in extracting mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) from a thigh bone (Femur XIII) whose age was estimated to be around 400,000 years based on the molecular clock . The DNA sequencing of this mtDNA revealed a high degree of similarity with the mtDNA of the Denisova people , whose existence was previously only known from a few finds from the Altai Mountains in southern Siberia . Also based on the molecular clock, it was concluded that the population to which the former owner of the femur belonged had common ancestors with the Denisova people 300,000 years earlier. The head of the mtDNA study, Matthias Meyer, therefore suspected that the Spanish population of Homo heidelbergensis had an ancestral population "from which both the Neanderthals and the Denisovans later emerged." Chris Stringer mentioned in this context, that the much older finds, described by Spanish researchers as Homo antecessor , could be considered candidates for such an ancestral population.

Culture

Hand ax from Boxgrove

Numerous stone tools are known from Homo heidelbergensis , which u. a. Served for cutting meat, but also for processing animal skins and wood. However, jewelry objects have not yet been discovered.

“Scratches in the enamel of the upper and lower incisors, which could have occurred with the jaw closed, suggest that Homo heidelbergensis from Sima de los Huesos was holding material with his teeth and then severing it with stone tools. Most such scratches run on the tooth surface from top left to bottom right; one can therefore assume that most of the individuals from Sima de los Huesos were right-handed. ”The wear and tear of the teeth was examined microscopically on finds from the Arago cave near Tautavel in southern France . The results suggested a rough diet that consisted of at least 80 percent vegetable components - this roughly corresponds to the food composition that is common among today's hunters and gatherers.

In the open- cast lignite mine of Schöningen ( Lower Saxony ), wooden spears and a throwing wood pointed on both sides were found, which are assigned to Homo heidelbergensis ; an age of around 400,000 years, but also - using a different method - of around 270,000 years has been published for these Schöninger spears . The Schöningen spears are mainly made of spruce and up to 2.5 m long. Due to their center of gravity, they may have been used as javelins. The spears were in a hunting camp among the remains of at least 15 horses. It can therefore be assumed that Homo heidelbergensis already used large game hunting for food. The careful processing of the spears suggests a well-developed culture of toolmaking. The Schöningen throwing stick is also ascribed to him, as are wooden shafts for stone blades as the first composite tools. Very similar finds were made at the Bilzingsleben site . In addition to presumably wooden equipment, a storage area with simple residential buildings and a central, paved area was excavated here. A piece of bone with regular incised patterns was also found. Although it is not known what this bone was for, it can be assessed as an indication of the ability to think abstractly. Cut marks on bones indicate that he was scraping meat from the bones.

The oldest fireplaces that were discovered in Europe and considered to be secure also come from Homo heidelbergensis ; they have been estimated to be around 400,000 years old, but may only be around 270,000 years old. A fireplace at the Terra Amata site in France was dated around 380,000 years ago.

500,000 year old stone artefacts from South Africa were interpreted as spearheads in 2012 and also attributed to Homo heidelbergensis ; However, the assignment of such old homo finds from Africa to Homo heidelbergensis is controversial, since other researchers have identified them as Homo erectus .

Known sites and their age

Most of the finds of Homo heidelbergensis come from limestone caves and quarries and, occasionally, from former river beds. The sites are all below 1000 m altitude in Spain, France, England, Germany, Hungary, Italy and Greece as well as in Israel and Morocco. In England, the populations probably died out during the glaciation phases of the Middle Pleistocene .

As early as 1907 a lower jaw and in 1908 fragments of a human skull were found in a quarry near Weimar -Ehringsdorf, which today can be identified as Homo heidelbergensis .

Replica of the upper jaw Arago I from the Arago cave
The Swanscombe skull (replica)

The most well-known sites, the fossils of which are definitely dated and which can also be attributed to Homo heidelbergensis , are:

In a review in 2008, Bernard Wood also assigned various fossils from China to Homo heidelbergensis , such as the finds from Dali (300,000 - 200,000 years old), Jinniushan (approx. 200,000 years old), Xujiayao (approx. 100,000 years old) and Yunxian (600,000 - 300,000 years old) ). Chris Stringer, however, pointed out in 2012 that the finds from Dali, Jinniushan, Yunxian and a find from Narmada in India could possibly be attributed to the Denisova people .

From when to when a fossil species existed can usually only be determined approximately. On the one hand, the fossil record is incomplete: there are usually only very few specimen copies for a fossil species. On the other hand, the dating methods indicate a certain age, but with considerable inaccuracy ; this inaccuracy then forms the outer limits for the "from ... to" information for lifetimes. All published age information is therefore provisional, which may also have to be revised after further specimen copies have been found.

See also

literature

Specialist literature
  • Otto Schoetensack : The lower jaw of Homo heidelbergensis from the sands of Mauer near Heidelberg. A contribution to human paleontology. Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann, Leipzig 1908 (digitized online) - Gutenberg eText
  • Aurélien Mounier: Is Homo heidelbergensis a distinct species? New insight on the wall mandible. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 56, No. 3, 2009, pp. 219-246, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2008.12.006
  • Aurélien Mounier: Validité du taxon Homo heidelbergensis Schoetensack, 1908. Dissertation, Université de la Mediterranée (Faculté de Médecine de Marseille), 2009 Summary (PDF)
  • Chris Stringer : The status of Homo heidelbergensis (Schoetensack 1908). In: Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews. Volume 21, No. 3, 2012, pp. 101-107, doi: 10.1002 / evan.21311
  • Michael Balter: RIP for a key Homo species? In: Science . Volume 345, No. 6193, p. 129, 2014, doi: 10.1126 / science.345.6193.129
  • Laura T. Buck and Chris Stringer: Homo heidelbergensis. In: Current Biology. Volume 24, No. 6, 2014, R214 – R215, doi: 10.1016 / j.cub.2013.12.048
Popular representations
  • Günther A. Wagner, Karl W. Beinhauer (eds.): Homo heidelbergensis von Mauer. The appearance of man in Europe. HVA, Heidelberg 1997, ISBN 3-8253-7105-0
  • Günther A. Wagner et al. (Ed.): Homo heidelbergensis. Key find in human history. Konrad Theiss Verlag, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-8062-2113-8 (currently the most comprehensive and latest version)
  • Homo heidelbergensis. 100 years return of the lower jaw of Mauer. Special issue 2/2007 of the journal Palaeos - Menschen und Zeiten , ed. from “Homo heidelbergensis von Mauer e. V. “Mauer 2007, ISSN  1863-1630

Web links

Commons : Homo heidelbergensis  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Homo heidelbergensis  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

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