Maba 1
Maba 1 (also: Maba-Mensch ; 马坝 人 , Mǎbàrén , English Maba Man / Ma Pa Man ) is the name of a Middle Paleolithic fossil that was found in a karst cave of Shizi Shan (“Lion Mountain”; geodata: 24 ° 40 ′ 27.3 ′ ′ N, 113 ° 34 ′ 49.8 ′ ′ E) near the village of Maba (Mabacun) in Shaoguan in the Chinese province of Guangdong and assigned to the genus Homo .
Find and dating
It is an incompletely preserved skull roof with forehead and nose area, broken into several pieces , the age of which has so far only been inaccurately determined. Using animal fossils from the same layer , the skull was initially dated to the middle to early Pleistocene . A later dating showed an age of around 130,000 years, but it is not certain that this dating concerned the find layer: the skull was found by farmers while mining fertilizer, which is why the find layer can only be approximately reconstructed. Another, also not sufficiently certain, dating suggested an age of almost 240,000 years.
The edentulous skull shows signs of eating; about 60 percent of the facial bones and about a quarter of the parietal bone are missing . A special feature that distinguishes this skull from other similarly dated finds are the relatively delicate bulges over the eyes , reminiscent of Neanderthals , which is why the find was initially described as resembling that of the Neanderthal. Chinese experts classified it as archaic Homo sapiens . If the dating is correct at least to the late Middle Pleistocene, this assignment is in contradiction to the genetic analyzes known today on the spread of humans , according to which the find can be assigned to Homo erectus .
In 2011 it was estimated that the skull belonged to a person around 50 years old at the time of death. At the same time, it was proven that he had an injury to the bone - at least partially healed - which must have been caused by a strong blow with a blunt object. This is evidenced by a crescent-shaped, eight millimeter long, 308 square millimeter large and 1.5 millimeter deep pressure mark on the right side of the skull, as well as a bulge at the same point on the inside of the skull. Signs of inflammation in the former wound area were not found, but indications of newly formed bone tissue after a fracture were found . The cause of the injury could not be clarified.
Francis Clark Howell called the fossil of Maba (formerly Mapa) with the epithet " mapaensis Kurth ". The taxonomist Colin Groves mentions that the fossil was introduced by Gerhard Heberer and Gottfried Kurth as " Homo erectus mapaensis Kurth (1965)". Colin Groves, meanwhile, decided in 1989 to rename it to " Homo sapiens mapaensis Kurth, 1965" (which today contradicts the increase in knowledge) .
The fossil is kept under archive number PA 84 in the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences .
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Xiu-Jie Wu et al .: Antemortem trauma and survival in the late Middle Pleistocene human cranium from Maba, South China. In: PNAS . Volume 108, No. 49, 2011, pp. 19558-19562, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.1117113108
- ^ Ian Tattersall : The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack - and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2015, p. 145, ISBN 978-1-137-27889-0
- ↑ Cihai ("Sea of Words"). In: Shanghai cishu chubanshe . Shanghai 2002, ISBN 7-5326-0839-5 , p. 1112.
- ^ Francis Clark Howell, Thoughts on the Study and Interpretation of the Human Fossil Record . In: Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences , Vol. 21 (1996), pp. 1-46, see page 19, ISSN 0885-4629 .
- ↑ Gerhard Heberer (Ed.): Human Descent Theory: Advances in Anthropogeny [ie Hominization] 1863–1964 . Gustav Fischer Verlag, Stuttgart 1965, page 383.
- ↑ Colin Groves: A theory of human and primate evolution . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1989, p. 286, ISBN 0-19-857629-3 .