Swart crane

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Swartkrans is a farm and archaeological site in South Africa , about 30 km from Johannesburg . The place is known for its wealth of archaeological finds, especially because of the fossils of early ancestors of the genus Homo ( Hominini ). It was bought by the University of Witwatersrand in 1968 . The paleontologist Robert Broom dug here regularly from 1948.

Finds

In the limestone of Swartkrans, fossils were found that were initially referred to as Telanthropus capensis , but are now assigned to Homo erectus , as well as fossils of Paranthropus , a genus that is now often viewed as a variant of the Australopithecus genus .

The use of fire in Swartkrans was dated to 1 million years ago and is considered the second oldest known record of the use of fire in the world. Member 3 has 59,488 remains of bones, 270 of which are burned. CK Brain assumes that the fire was not created intentionally, but that burning pieces of wood were collected from bush fires. From the lower layer of Member 1 come three burned bones (among 153,781 bone finds in total), here Brain assumes that there were grass fires that also reached the cave.

A number of bone tools (members 1-3) also come from Swartkrans.

World Heritage

Swartkrans since 1999, UNESCO - World Heritage Site and, like other sites, as " Cradle of Humankind " ( cradle of humanity called).

literature

  • Alessandro Riga, Tommaso Mori, Travis Rayne Pickering et al .: Ages ‐ at ‐ death distribution of the early Pleistocene hominin fossil assemblage from Drimolen (South Africa). In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology. Volume 168, No. 3, 2019, pp. 632-636, doi: /10.1002/ajpa.23771

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ CK Brain, Fifty Years of Fun with Fossils. In: T. Pickering et al. , Breathing live into Fossils: Taphonomic studies in Honor of Bob Brain. Gosport 2007, p. 18
  2. ^ CK Brain, Fifty Years of Fun with Fossils. In: T. Pickering et al., Breathing live into Fossils: Taphonomic studies in Honor of Bob Brain. Gosport 2007, p. 13

Coordinates: 25 ° 55 ′ 45 ″  S , 27 ° 47 ′ 20 ″  E