Sangiran II

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The Sangiran II fossil (original)

Sangiran II (also: Pithecanthropus II ) is the name of a particularly well-preserved fossil of Homo erectus . It was named after the Sangiran archaeological site on the Indonesian island of Java . This fossil is an almost complete roof of the skull with a distinctive, continuous transverse bulge of the frontal bone above the root of the nose (" bulge above the eye "). The find consisted of a total of 33 fragments, which were handed over to Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald on August 12 and 13, 1937 . Its fossil collector Atmowidjojo had discovered the skull roof in the deposits of a former river known as the fossil deposit, about one kilometer northeast of the village of Bapeng. Since von Koenigswald paid his helpers for each find, the fossil was smashed into several pieces. The brain volume of the skull was more than 800 cm³.

The top of the skull resembled the fossil Trinil II, which was also discovered in Java by Eugène Dubois in 1891 and, according to Koenigswald's assessment, came from "the same strata", so that von Koenigswald also assigned his find to the species Pithecanthropus erectus . Trinil II was the type specimen of this species first described by Dubois ; Only since the 1980s have all homo finds from Java been referred to as Homo erectus at the suggestion of the US paleontologist Albert Santa Luca .

Due to the find situation in the deposits of a former body of water, an exact absolute dating of the fossils discovered in Sangiran has not been successful until today . It cannot be ruled out that the alluvial bones had been deposited elsewhere for a long time, were exposed again by soil erosion and came to rest again at the site of the discovery. Using two layers of volcanic sediments between which these fossils lay, however, their minimum age (1.02 million years) and their maximum age (1.5 million years) could be determined; The Senckenberg research institute reported the age of Sangiran II in 2008 as 1.5 million years, but in 2020 the first colonization of Java by Homo erectus was dated around 1.3 million years ago in the journal Science .

The find is considered to be the most important piece in the Koenigswald collection and is now being kept in the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main as a permanent loan from the Werner Reimers Foundation.

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Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Stephanie Müller, Ottmar Kullmer and Thorsten Wenzel: Sangiran II. A skullcap and its scientific interpretation. In: Nature and Museum. Volume 138, No. 1-2, 2008, p. 31, ISSN  0178-1286
  2. ^ Albert P. Santa Luca: The Ngandong fossil hominids: A comparative study of a far eastern Homo erectus group. Yale University Press, New Haven 1980, ISBN 978-0-91351611-9 (= Yale University Publications in Anthropology 78).
  3. ↑ Gary J. Sawyer, Viktor Deak: The Long Way to Man. Life pictures from 7 million years of evolution. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg 2008, p. 117
  4. ↑ Stephanie Müller et al .: Sangiran II ... , p. 30
  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. ^ Short biography of Werner Reimers on the website of the Werner Reimers Foundation