Java human

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Eugène Dubois' finds : cranium , molar and femur

Fossils that were first discovered in 1891 by Eugène Dubois on the banks of the Solo River (also: Bengawan Solo) near Trinil in East Java are referred to as Java man . As far as we know today, they are assigned an age of around one million years. These were the first fossils of hominini to be discovered outside of Europe and, after the Neanderthals, the second evidence of fossil relatives of anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ). The finds from Java were initially referred to as Anthropopithecus and later as Pithecanthropus erectus . Today, they are by most paleoanthropologists the kind Homo erectus associated with its origin on occasion by adding a subspecies - epithet is emphasized: Homo erectus javanicus . The Peking man is considered a close temporal relative .

Dating

Soon after the discovery of the hominine fossils, Eugène Dubois was aware - not least because of the small internal volume of the skull of around 950 cm³ - that these were very old finds, because “they were part of a fossil fauna that was not only numerous species, but also many genera of now extinct animals belonged. ”The exact dating of the finds, however, proved to be difficult, and recently their chronological classification was repeatedly updated through additional finds, investigations and findings.

The fossils discovered on Java probably come from two epochs: The fossils from the sites of Sangiran and Trinil are considered to be 1.66 to 0.9 million years old , although they are often assigned a lower age limit of 700,000 years and a possible upper limit of 2020 Was published 1.3 million years ago; the fossils from the location Solo (alternatively: Ngandong), which are also known as " Homo soloensis ", are much younger. However , in 1997 it was doubted whether their assignment to Homo erectus was correct, as the site of Homo soloensis could not be reliably dated as a result of soil rearrangements and may only be 27,000 years old. In 2011, however, a 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.

Find history

Gabriel von Max : Attempt to depict the prehistoric man Pithecanthropus alalus (late 19th century), preliminary study for an oil painting

In 1871, Charles Darwin, in his work The Descent of Man and Sexual Selection, suggested that man evolved in Africa because that is where his closest relatives - chimpanzees and gorillas - are native. In contrast to Darwin, Ernst Haeckel had three years earlier (1868) in his Natural Creation Story the view that “most of the signs pointed to southern Asia”. Haeckel based his conjecture primarily on the comparison of hair, skin color and skull shape of the then primitive , now indigenous peoples of Africa and Asia with the great apes . At the same time, however, Haeckel conceded: “Perhaps Eastern Africa was also the place where primitive man first emerged from human-like apes; perhaps also a continent now sunk under the mirror of the Indian Ocean, which in the south of what is now Asia stretched on the one hand east to the Sunda Islands , on the other hand west to Madagascar and Africa. "Haeckel called the hypothetical prehistoric man" Homo primigenius ("original man") ) or Pithecanthropus primigenius ”(“ original ape man ”), where he assumed a smooth transition from hypothetical“ ape man (Pithecanthropi) ”to speechless“ prehistoric man (Alali) ”.

The name Pithecanthropus is derived from the Greek  πίθηκος , pronounced píthēkos ("monkey") and anthropos ("man"). The plural formation 'Alali' and the corresponding epithet alalus is derived from the Greek ἄλαλος ("speechless", "dumb").

Haeckel's hypothesis, the Sunda Islands were the remains of a sunken continent on which prehistoric apes to the ancestors of humans and other now time apes developed, fascinated the young Dutch military doctor Eugène Dubois such that it is 1877 after Sumatra was put to Search for fossils in the Malay Archipelago area . In his book The Early Period of man describes Friedemann Schrenk Dubois' approach as follows: "Obsessed with his idea, he started at a point in Java to dig, that would apply to today's ideas as completely hopeless. He dug in an area where within a radius of thousands of kilometers the slightest hint of remnants of a prehistoric man had never been found - and he dug in the right place to the centimeter. ”Dubois, however, knew tips from farmers who worked there He had found animal fossils and was allowed to use prisoners for his excavations, who were guarded by corporals of the army.

Dubois' excavation helpers discovered a molar tooth in 1891 (whose assignment to the genus Homo is now considered uncertain) and a few weeks later the fragment of a skullcap (archive number Trinil 2 ) and, in the following year, a fully preserved femur . While Dubois had interpreted his first two finds as the ancestors of the African non- hominine great apes and therefore assigned them to the genus Anthropopithecus , after the discovery of the femur he was convinced that this fossil "great ape" could already walk upright. Thereupon Dubois used in his work report for the 3rd quarter of 1892, in which he described the thighbone exactly - casually and without a formal diagnosis - for the roof of the skull, tooth and leg bones the designation Anthropopithecus erectus Eug. Dubois ("upright walking ape"). This quarterly report, which may not have been printed until 1893, thus became the first description of a new species.

In 1894 Dubois was convinced that he had found the prehistoric man predicted by Haeckel, so that from then on he referred to his fossil finds as Pithecanthropus erectus ("upright ape man").

Final naming

Skull roof " Sangiran II " ( Homo erectus , original, 1.5 mya ), Koenigswald collection in the Senckenberg Nature Museum . Note the bulge above the left eye.
Reconstruction of a skull ( Rostock Zoological Collection )
Reconstruction of the brain using paleoneurological methods

Dubois' interpretation remained controversial for a long time. The German anatomist Hans Virchow , for example, attributed the finds from Java to a fossil giant gibbon . This only began to change after the Peking people were discovered in the 1920s . In addition, further fossils were found in the vicinity of Trinil in the early 1930s: In 1931 Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald and Carel ter Haar discovered several skull fragments near Ngandong , which the Dutch researcher Willem Oppennoorth named Homo soloensis ; In 1936 von Koenigswald declared the fossil skullcap of a child to be the holotype of the new species Homo modjokertensis (named after the city of Mojokerto ); the 1937 discovered in 33 fragments skull roof Sangiran II (see illustration) assigned von Königswald to the species Pithecanthropus erectus , "because it corresponds completely to your discovery of Trinil", as he wrote in a letter to Dubois; Franz Weidenreich later assigned the names Pithecanthropus robustus and Pithecanthropus dubios to other finds from the same region (including near Sangiran ) .

In 1950, von Königswald no longer classified his Sangiran IV find as Homo modjokertensis , but as Homo erectus modjokertensis . In the same year, Ernst Mayr also proposed at the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on Quantitative Biology that the still very few finds should be assigned to the genus Homo . This was taken up by the world's leading paleoanthropologists gathered there , with the result that only the species epithet erectus last used by Eugène Dubois was retained and has been preserved until the present under the name Homo erectus . Dubois Fund Trinil 2 thus became the type specimen of Homo erectus . But only since 1980, on the suggestion of the American paleontologist Albert Santa Luca, have actually all homo finds from Java been referred to as Homo erectus .

Effects of the Java discoveries

After the hitherto oldest pre-human fossils were found on Java and near Beijing in the 1920s , the opinion prevailed among paleoanthropologists that - as Ernst Haeckel had already suspected in 1868 - primitive humans had developed in Asia. A much older fossil (more than two million years old) discovered in South Africa in 1924 - called the child of Taung and assigned to the new genus and species Australopithecus africanus - was therefore only recognized as an ancestor of man by the leading paleoanthropologists of its era in 1947. Only then did the out-of-Africa theory gain more supporters.

According to a study published at the end of 2011, more than 80 fossils of Homo erectus had been recovered in Sangiran by then , from archaeological finds that were aged between 1.51 and 0.9 million years using the 40 Ar- 39 Ar method were dated. According to this study, the Sangiran finds are so different from the younger fossils known as Peking Man that both Homo erectus populations may have immigrated to Asia independently - in two separate waves - from Africa.

Possible further development

In a detailed study of the morphological peculiarities of the skull LB1 - the holotype of Homo floresiensis - the genealogical derivation of this fossil from the Java people was shown to be most likely.

In 2007, a student studying fossil mussel shells came across a collection of mussel shells by Eugène Dubois in the Naturalis Museum of Natural History in Leiden , which came from what Dubois called the main bone layer . It turned out that numerous shells had been pierced with the help of a pointed object, in places that were used to open the shells of living mussels. In addition, a conch shell had several zigzag-shaped incisions; the shells were dated to 540,000 to 430,000 years ago, which is why the holes and incisions were ascribed to Homo erectus .

literature

  • Eugène Dubois : Paleontological Investigation on Java. In: W. Eric Meikle, Sue Taylor Parker: Naming our Ancestors. An Anthology of Hominid Taxonomy. Waveland Press, Prospect Heights (Illinois) 1994, ISBN 0-88133-799-4 , pp. 37-40. - Translation of the first description of Anthropopithecus erectus (= Homo erectus ) written in Dutch in 1882 by the Berkeley Scientific Translation Service.
  • Eugène Dubois: Pithecanthropus Erectus . A human-like transitional form from Java. GE Stechert & Co (Alfred Hafner), New York 1915.
  • Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald : Encounters with the pre-humans. dtv, Volume 269, Munich 1965
  • Phillip Tobias and Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald: A Comparison Between the Olduvai Hominines and those of Java and some Implications for Hominid Phylogeny. In: Nature . Volume 204, 1964, pp. 515-518, doi: 10.1038 / 204515a0

Web links

Wiktionary: Pithecanthropus  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations
Wiktionary: Pithecanthropus alalus  - explanations of meanings, word origins , synonyms, translations
Wiktionary: Pithecanthropus erectus  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gary J. Sawyer, Viktor Deak: The Long Way to Man. Life pictures from 7 million years of evolution. Spectrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg, 2008, p. 117. The “minimum age” is shown here as 700,000 years, and the - “possibly too high” - upper limit is shown as 1.5 million years.
  2. ^ Ian Tattersall : Masters of the Planet. The Search for Our Human Origins. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, ISBN 978-0-230-10875-2 , p. 89.
  3. ↑ Susan C. Antón, Fred Spoor, Connie D. Fellmann, and Carl C. Swisher III: Defining Homo erectus: Size Considered. Chapter 11 in: Winfried Henke and Ian Tattersall (Eds.): Handbook of Paleoanthropology. Volume 3, 2015, p. 1658, ISBN 978-3-540-32474-4 .
  4. ↑ The Java Man skullcap. At: talkorigins.org , accessed July 30, 2018.
  5. ↑ Shuji Matsu'ura et al .: Age control of the first appearance date for Javanese Homo erectus in the Sangiran area. In: Science . Volume 367, No. 6474, 2020, pp. 210–214, doi: 10.1126 / science.aau8556 .
  6. ^ Rainer Grün and Alan Thorne: Dating the Ngandong Humans. In: Science. Volume 276, No. 5318, 1997, pp. 1575-1576, doi: 10.1126 / science.276.5318.1575
  7. ↑ Etty Indriati include: 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
  8. ↑ uni-jena.de : Object of the Month November 2010. From the Ernst Haeckel House Jena. Dump dated August 21, 2012.
  9. ^ Charles Darwin: The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London, John Murray, 1871, Volume 1, p. 199: “In each great region of the world the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It is therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee; and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. "
  10. ↑ Ernst Haeckel: Natural history of creation. Commonly understood scientific lectures on the theory of evolution in general and that of Darwin, Goethe and Lamarck in particular, on the application of these to the origin of man and other related fundamental questions of natural science. Berlin, Georg Reimer, 1868, chapter 19 ( full text )
  11. ↑ Friedemann Schrenk : The early days of man. The way to Homo sapiens. CH Beck, 1997, p. 81.
  12. ^ The Discovery of Java Man in 1891 ( Memento June 4, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) From: Athena Review. Volume 4, No. 1: Homo erectus
  13. ^ Ian Tattersall : The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack - and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2015, ISBN 978-1-137-27889-0 , p. 38.
  14. ↑ The thigh bone is now attributed to anatomically modern humans ( Homo sapiens ) by some researchers , see in particular Michael Herbert Day and Theya I. Molleson: The Trinil femora. In: MH Day (Ed.): Human Evolution. Symposia of the Society for the Study of Human Biology. Volume 11, Taylor & Francis, London 1973, pp. 127-154.
  15. ↑ Greek  ἄνθρωπος ánthropos: "man" and píthēkos: "monkey"; Anthropopithecus was the generic name for chimpanzees at that time
  16. ^ Eugène Dubois: Paleontologische onderzoekingen op Java. Verslag van het Mijnwezen, 3rd Qu. 1892, pp. 10-14.
  17. ^ Eugène Dubois: Pithecanthropus erectus: a human-like transitional form from Java. Landes-Druckerei, Batavia , 1894, (full text)
  18. ^ Eugène Dubois: On Pithecanthropus erectus: A Transitional Form between Man and the Apes. In: Scientific Transactions of the Royal Dublin Society. Ser. 2, 6, 1896, pp. 1-18.
  19. ↑ Eugène Dubois: Pithecanthropus erectus, an ancestral form of humans. In: Anatomischer Anzeiger . Volume 12, 1896, pp. 1-22.
  20. ↑ Hans Virchow's biography
  21. ^ 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.
  22. ↑ GHR von Koenigswald: A fossil hominid from the Altpleistocän Ostjavas. In: De Ingenieur in Nederlandsch-Indie. IV. Mijbouw & Geologie, De Mijningenieur Jaargang III (8), pp. 149–157
    For an overview see: O. Frank Huffman et al .: Historical Evidence of the 1936 Mojokerto Skull Discovery, East Java. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 48, No. 4, 2005, pp. 321-363, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2004.09.001
  23. ↑ quoted from: Stephanie Müller and others: Sangiran II…. P. 31.
  24. ^ GHR von Koenigswald: Fossil hominds from the lower Pleistocene of Java. In: Reports of the 18th session, International Geological Congress, Great Britain, 1948, part IX. London 1950, pp. 59-61.
  25. ^ Albert P. Santa Luca: The Ngandong fossil hominids: A comparative study of a far eastern Homo erectus group. Yale University, 1980.
  26. ↑ Yahdi Zaim include: New 1.5 million-year-old Homo erectus maxilla from Sangiran (Central Java, Indonesia). In: Journal of Human Evolution . Volume 61, No. 4, 2011, pp. 363-376, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2011.04.009
  27. ↑ Yousuke Kaifu include: Craniofacial morphology of Homo floresiensis: Description, taxonomic affinities, and implication evolutionary. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 61, No. 6, 2011, pp. 644-682, doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2011.08.008
  28. ^ Etchings on a 500,000-year-old shell appear to have been made by human ancestor. On: sciencemag.org of December 3, 2014.
  29. ↑ Josephine CA Joordens et al: Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving. In: Nature. Volume 518, No. 7538, 2015, pp. 228-231, doi: 10.1038 / nature13962