Homo sapiens idaltu
| Homo sapiens idaltu | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Skull of Homo sapiens idaltu |
||||||||||||
| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Pleistocene | ||||||||||||
| 160,000 to 154,000 years | ||||||||||||
| Locations | ||||||||||||
| Systematics | ||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Homo sapiens idaltu | ||||||||||||
| White , 2003 | ||||||||||||
Homo sapiens idaltu (also: Herto skull ) is a name for fossils of the genus Homo from Ethiopia , whichwere dated to an age of 160,000 to 154,000 yearsusing the 39 Ar- 40 Ar method . In the first description , the fossils wereinterpreted as belonging to the direct ancestry of modern humans ( Homo sapiens )due to their morphology . Idaltu is a word of the Afar language and means "tribal elder".
The finds closed a gap between the time before 300,000 and 100,000 years ago in the sequence of definitely dated homo- fossils; they are seen as a further indication of the out-of-Africa theory .
Description of the finds
The first description of the Herto finds is based on three broken, but largely complete skulls and a skull fragment that were found in 1997 at the Middle Awash , near the Ethiopian town of Herto. These are bones from three adults (one of whom has been interpreted as male) and a six to seven year old child. The best preserved (“male”) skull had a brain volume of 1450 cm³, which corresponds to that of a modern person. It was chosen as the type specimen for Homo sapiens idaltu (archive number BOU-VP-16/1) and is kept together with the other finds in the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa .
According to the first description, the shape of the Herto skull shows no particular proximity to the skull features of the recent African populations ; the greatest resemblance is to Australian Aborigines and oceanic natives.
Overall, however, the shape of the skull deviates considerably from the older finds from Kabwe (" Homo rhodesiensis ") relating to the archaic Homo sapiens and from the younger ones from the Qafzeh cave in Israel . The shape of the skull was therefore designated as intermediate and the justification derived from this to name the fossils as an extinct subspecies of Homo sapiens (in the sense of a chronospecies ). However, this classification was already criticized by Chris Stringer at the time of its first publication and has been controversial since other scientists consider the described differences to the more recent finds of Homo sapiens to be too small due to the great variability of the species .
Accompanying finds
The accompanying finds included stone tools from the late Acheuléen as well as the remains of fossil horses ( Equus ), wildebeest ( Connochaetes ), waterbuck ( Kobus ), cane rats ( Thryonomys ) and hippos , which suggests a biotope of savannah and freshwater areas .
See also
Web links
- Reconstruction drawing
- netzeitung.de ( Memento from February 11, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ) from June 12, 2003: We are all Africans.
Individual evidence
- ↑ John Desmond Clark et al .: Stratigraphic, chronological and behavioral contexts of Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia. In: Nature . Volume 423, 2003, pp. 747-752, doi : 10.1038 / nature01670
- ↑ Tim White , Berhane Asfaw et al .: Pleistocene Homo sapiens from Middle Awash, Ethiopia. In: Nature. Volume 423, 2003, pp. 742-747, doi : 10.1038 / nature01669
- ↑ 160,000-year-old fossilized skulls uncovered in Ethiopia are oldest anatomically modern humans. On: berkeley.edu from June 11, 2003 (Explanation of the find by Tim White and Berhane Asfaw )
-
↑ Chris Stringer : Out of Ethiopia. In: Nature. Volume 423, 2003, pp. 692–695, doi: 10.1038 / 423692a
Stringer refers in particular to similarities with fossil Homo sapiens finds from Australia, see overview of Australian finds . - ↑ talkorigins.org : Herto skulls