Sangiran

Sangiran Early Man Site
UNESCO world heritage
National territory:	Indonesia
Type:	Culture
Criteria :	iii, vi
Surface:	5600 ha
Reference No .:	593
UNESCO region :	Asia and Pacific
History of enrollment
Enrollment:	1996  (session 20)

Sangiran is an archaeological dig site on the island of Java in Indonesia . The excavation area covers about 48 km² and is located in the province of Central Java , about 15 kilometers north of Surakarta .

In 1996 it was recognized as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO .

Research history

In 1934 the anthropologist Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald began investigating this area. In the following years some of the oldest fossils of the genus Homo outside of Africa were discovered during excavations (see illustrations of skull and lower jaw Sangiran II and Sangiran IV). The Sangiran 17 skull was discovered in 1969 and scientifically described in 1972.

The finds were initially called Pithecanthropus erectus or Java man ; Since the 1980s, all similarly old fossils from Java have been assigned to Homo erectus . The first colonization of Java by Homo erectus was dated around 1.3 million years ago in the journal Science in 2020 .

To date, the fossil remains of around 40 individuals have been discovered on Java, including, in addition to the hominine fossils of Sangiran, also finds called Meganthropus and the fossils known as Ngandong man .

gallery

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  Skull roof " Sangiran II " (original, 1.5 mya ), Koenigswald collection in the Senckenberg Nature Museum

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  Lower jaw Sangiran IV (original, 1.6 mya), Koenigswald collection in the Senckenberg Nature Museum

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  Sangiran 17 (replica) is the most complete fossil of a skull from Sangiran to date

literature

• Carl C. Swisher et al .: Age of the earliest known hominids in Java, Indonesia. In: Science . Volume 263, No. 5150, 1994, pp. 1118-1121, doi: 10.1126 / science.8108729

Web links

Commons : Sangiran  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Entry on the UNESCO World Heritage Center website ( English and French ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ UNESCO World Heritage Center: Sangiran Early Man Site. Retrieved September 4, 2017 . 
2. ↑ Soedjojo Sartono: Discovery of Another Hominid Skull at Sangiran, Central Java. In: Current Anthropology. Volume 13, No. 1, 1972, pp. 124-126, doi: 10.1086 / 201255
3. ↑ 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 .
4. ↑ Friedemann Schrenk : The early days of man. The way to Homo sapiens. Beck, Munich 1997, p. 83.
5. ^ DE Tyler: "Meganthropus" cranial fossils from Java. In: Human Evolution. Volume 16, No. 2, 2001, pp. 81-101, doi: 10.1007 / BF02438642

Coordinates: 7 ° 24 ′ 0 ″  S , 110 ° 49 ′ 0 ″  E