Swanscombe skull

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View of the occipital hole of the Swanscombe skull (reconstruction with additions in the area of ​​the occipital hole)

Swanscombe skull ( English Swanscombe skull ; also: Swanscombe man , Swanscombe hominid ) is the name for three related fragments of a fossil skull from the Middle Pleistocene , which were discovered in Great Britain .

Discovery story

The British doctor and hobby paleontologist Alvan Theophilus Marston (1889–1971) discovered the Swanscombe skull and worked in the Barnfield Pit gravel pit from November 1933 (coordinates of the site: 51 ° 26 ′ 40.5 ″ N, 0 ° 17 ′ 54.4 "E ) near the village of Swanscombe in the county of Kent ( Borough of Dartford ) in England was looking for fossils.

The pit Barnfield Pit had been known for decades for the searchable there stone tools from the era of Acheulian and Middle Pleistocene animal fossils. On June 29, 1935, Marston discovered the first bone fragment, which, based on his knowledge of anatomy, he identified as the occiput of a prehistoric man. A year later, on March 15, 1936, Marston discovered the well-preserved left parietal bone belonging to the same skull at the same site . The search by representatives of the Royal Anthropological Institute for further fragments of the skull was initially unsuccessful. It was not until July 30, 1955, that John Wymer finally discovered a third fragment of the skull, the less well-preserved right parietal bone.

The stratigraphic position of the finds is a publication of 1999, probably in accordance with the Mindel Tear interglacial equate what was stated by the authors with about 400,000 years ago. The skullcap would therefore be about as old as the so-called Tautavel man from the Arago cave in the Occitania region of southern France . Hominin fossils from this epoch are now mostly classified as Homo heidelbergensis and are considered to be close relatives of the immediate ancestors of the Neanderthals . A proposal from 1943 to designate the skull as Homo sapiens-protosapiens did not gain acceptance in the professional world.

The depository of the fossil is the Natural History Museum in London.

meaning

The three fragments allowed an exact reconstruction of the back of the head, from which an internal cranial volume of approx. 1300 ml could be derived (for comparison: Homo sapiens approx. 1500 ml); several features suggest a proximity to the ancestral line of the Neanderthals. Due to the relatively small muscle fiber attachments, it was suggested that it could be the remains of a woman.

In the years following its discovery, the Swanscombe skull was considered to be the third oldest hominine fossil discovered in Europe after the Piltdown man - who was not revealed as a fake until the early 1950s - and the lower jaw of Mauer . The Swanscombe skull was initially assigned an age of 200,000, later 300,000 years. The Steinheim skull, which was first described in 1933 and is about the same age as Swanscombe , was estimated by Alvan Marston to be only 175,000 years old. Today the Swanscombe skull is considered to be the second oldest hominine fossil in Great Britain after the 500,000 year old find by Boxgrove .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Alvan T. Marston: The Swanscombe Skull. In: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. Volume 67, 1937, pp. 339-406
  2. ^ Alvan T. Marston: Preliminary Note on a New Fossil Human Skull from Swanscombe, Kent. In: Nature . Volume 138, 1936, pp. 200-201, doi: 10.1038 / 138200a0
  3. ↑ The Swanscombe Skull. In: Nature. Volume 143, 1939, pp. 187-188, doi: 10.1038 / 143187a0
  4. ^ John McNabb: John Wymer: An Appreciation. In: Lithics. No. 26, 2005, access to the full text
  5. ↑ a b Chris Stringer , Jean-Jacques Hublin : New age estimates for the Swanscombe hominid, and their significance for human evolution. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 37, 1999, pp. 873–877, doi: 10.1006 / jhev.1999.0367 , full text (PDF; 77 kB) ( Memento from November 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ George Montandon: L'homme préhistorique et les préhumanes. Payot, Paris 1943
  7. ^ Matthew M. Skinner and Bernard Wood: The evolution of modern human life history - a paleontological perspective. In: Kristen Hawkes and Richard R. Paine (Eds.): The Evolution of Modern Human Life History. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe 2006, p. 351, ISBN 978-1-930618-72-5 .
  8. ^ Jean-Jacques Hublin: The origin of Neandertals. In: PNAS . Volume 106, No. 38, 2009, pp. 16022-16027, doi: 10.1073 / pnas.0904119106
  9. ^ A b c Alvan T. Marston: The Relative Ages of the Swanscombe and Piltdown Skulls [...]. In: British Dental Journal. Volume 88, No. 11, 1950, pp. 292–299, full text ( Memento from May 30, 2001 in the Internet Archive )