Homo soloensis

As Homo soloensis ( also: solo man or Ngandong-human ) are fossils which have in the east of the island Java in the river terrace of Solo were found and the kind of Homo erectus are assigned. According to a date published in 2019, their age is around 110,000 years; they are therefore considered to be the latest evidence of the existence of Homo erectus . With other similarly old hominine fossils discovered on Java and the much older finds from Sangiran (age 1.51 to 0.9 million years), the fossils from the Solo River are also referred to as Java people .

Finds

The bank terraces along the Solo River were already known at the end of the 19th century as a rich site for fossils of various animal species. As early as 1891, Eugène Dubois had discovered hominine fossils on the river bank near Trinil , which are now also referred to as Homo erectus .

The skull fragments, sometimes referred to as "Solo people", were discovered in 1931/32 on the banks of the Solo River near the city of Ngandong , 10 km north of Ngawi , under the direction of the geologist Carel ter Haar and by the Dutch geologist Willem Oppennoorth initially named as Homo soloensis . However, the similarity of the solo fossils with the earlier finds of hominine fossils on Java and with the Peking people ultimately led to the interpretation of the solo fossils as a variant of Homo erectus ; occasionally they are also referred to as Homo erectus soloensis - to indicate where they were found .

Parts of at least eleven skulls (archive numbers Solo I to Solo XI) and two tibia bones (tibia A and B) were found as early as the 1930s . Later the names of the finds were changed to Ngandong 1 to Ngandong 12 (plus tibia A and B), while a third system names the fossils today as Ngandong 1 to Ngandong 14, with the tibiae as Ngandong 9 and 10; Ngandong 1 (= Solo I) is the type specimen of Homo soloensis , its place of storage is the Geological Research and Development Center in Bandung . The facial bones are absent in all skulls, and in many the bones of the skull base. Like other Homo erectus finds , the Solo fossils have thick bones and massive bulges above the eyes . The skull volume reconstructed on the basis of the fragments averages 1135 cm ³ .

Other fossils come from a site near Sambungmacan, which is also on the Solo River, including the Sm3 skull , which was recovered in 1977 and later identified by Eric Delson in a New York souvenir shop, and the Sm4 skull, which was recovered directly from the site in 2001.

Age

The exact age of the finds remained unclear for a long time: their embedding in the sediments of the Solo River indicated a rather young age, but their appearance suggests a rather old age. Since the fossils were washed ashore, it could not be ruled out that they had been reburied several times over the millennia. For example, a study published in Science in 1997 argued that some of the fossils could only be 53,300 ± 4,000 to 27,000 ± 2,000 years old. In 2011, ⁴⁰ Ar- ³⁹ Ar dating resulted in a lower age limit of 143,000 ± 20,000 years and an upper limit of 546,000 ± 12,000 years. In 2019, an age of 117,000 to 108,000 years was finally reconstructed using a complex dating.

It now seems to be certain that finds of Homo erectus also fall from this site in an era that is much longer in the past than the immigration of Homo sapiens to today's Indonesia.

literature

• Franz Weidenreich : Morphology of Solo Man. In: Anthropology Papers of the American Museum of Natural History. Volume 43, No. 3, New York 1951, pp. 205–290, full text (PDF), with numerous illustrations

See also

• List of gay epithets

Web links

• Finding showing human ancestor older than previously thought offers new insights into evolution. On: terradaily.com on July 5, 2011, accessed November 8, 2017
• Notes from an excavation. Russell L. Ciochon and his team are in Indonesia investigating the geological source and age of one of the world's biggest caches of Homo erectus. On: nature.com from July 28, 2010

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Rainer Grün, Alan Thorne: Dating the Ngandong Humans. In: Science. Volume 276, No. 5318, 1997, pp. 1575-1576, doi: 10.1126 / science.276.5318.1575
2. ^ WFF Oppennoorth: Homo (Javanthropus) soloensis: een plistocene Mensch van Java. In: Wetenschappelijke medeligen Dienst van den Mijnbrouw in Nederlandsch-Indië. Volume 20, 1932, p. 49 ff. Oppennoorth expressly withdrew the name Javanthropus proposed as
   a 'subgenus' of the genus Homo in 1937, see WFF Oppenoorth: The place of Homo soloensis among fossil men. In: GG McCurdy (Ed.): Early Man. Lippincott, Philadelphia and New York 1937, pp. 349-360.
3. ^ Bernard Wood : Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, p. 545
4. ↑ Jeffrey T. Laitman and Ian Tattersall: Homo erectus newyorkensis: An Indonesian Fossil Rediscovered in Manhattan Sheds Light on the Middle Phase of Human Evolution. In: The Anatomical Record . Volume 262, 2001, pp. 341-343
5. ↑ Eric Delson et al .: The Sambungmacan 3 Homo erectus Calvaria: A Comparative Morphometric and Morphological Analysis. In: The Anatomical Record. Volume 262, 2001, pp. 380-397
6. ^ Bernard Wood: Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution , p. 685
7. ^ Carl C. Swisher et al .: Latest Homo erectus of Java: Potential Contemporaneity with Homo sapiens in Southeast Asia. In: Science . Volume 274, No. 5294, 1996, pp. 1870-1874, doi: 10.1126 / science.274.5294.1870
8. ↑ Etty Indriati et al .: The Age of the 20-meter solo River Terrace, Java, Indonesia and the Survival of Homo erectus in Asia. In: PLOS ONE . 6 (6): e21562, doi: 10.1371 / journal.pone.0021562
9. ↑ Yan Rizal et al .: Last appearance of Homo erectus at Ngandong, Java, 117,000-108,000 years ago. In: Nature . Volume 577, 2020, pp. 381-385, doi: 10.1038 / s41586-019-1863-2 .
   Researchers determine age for last known settlement by a direct ancestor to modern humans. On: eurekalert.org from December 18, 2019.