Keilor skull
The Keilor skull is the name given to the remains of an early inhabitant of the Australian continent , who was discovered in 1940 two kilometers north of Keilor while digging sand. Several fragments of a femur were also discovered in its immediate vicinity . The results of the dating of the finds differ from one another: radiocarbon dating of the skull and thighbones revealed an age of around 8,000 years each; an earlier date for the carbonates attached to the bones was around 12,000 years. In 1943 the find was even dated to the Eem warm period, which would have corresponded to an age of 120,000 years.
According to the dates, the barely deformed keilor skull is much younger than Mungo Man , but much better preserved than Mungo Man . His discovery fueled the scientific controversy surrounding the ancestry of the Australian Aborigines in the 1940s. Its anatomical features were interpreted very differently; for example, in 1943 DJ Mahony claimed a mixture of Tasmanian and Australoid characteristics, thus apparently supporting the thesis that the Aborigines emerged from a mixture of several originally culturally and biologically separate immigrant groups.
Today the skull is interpreted - in comparison with recent Aborigines - as being somewhat larger and stronger than these, but not deviating from them dramatically.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Peter Brown : Description of the Keilor skull. Accessed September 3, 2015
- ↑ Peter Brown: Pleistocene homogeneity and Holocene size reduction: the Australian human skeletal evidence. In: Archeology in Oceania. Volume 22, 1987, pp. 41-71
- ^ DJ Mahony: The Keilor skull: geological evidence of antiquity. In: Memoirs of the National Museum of Victoria. Volume 13, 1943, pp. 79-81
- ↑ Peter Brown: Coobool Creek: A morphological and metrical analysis of the crania, mandibles and dentitions of a prehistoric Australian human population. In: Terra Australis. Volume 13, 1989, Department of Prehistory, Australian National University, Canberra