Dali man

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As Dali-man ( Chinese  大荔人 , Pinyin Dàlìrén , English Dali Man,  - " Homo sapiens daliensis ") is a 1978 county Dali prefecture-level city of Weinan the Chinese province of Shaanxi discovered, well-preserved fossil called skull of a male teenager.

The Dali man comes from an epoch between the Peking man and the Dingcun man and plays a key role in the theory, mainly advocated by Chinese researchers, that modern man did not develop from Homo erectus in Africa alone (“ Out -of-Africa-Theory ”), but simultaneously in several continents (“ Multiregional origin of modern man ”).

Site and conservation

The skull was discovered in 1978 in the western part of Dali near the village of Jiefang in a layer of fine gravel in the lower part of the third terrace of the Luo He (Luò Hé) river . The place where the Dali people were found, the Tianshuigou site (甜 水沟 遗址 Tianshuigou yizhi; English T'ien-shui-kou site ), has been on the list of monuments of the People's Republic of China since 2006 . The find itself is kept in the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and is not open to the public.

In contrast to many other finds of hominini in China, the skull is almost completely preserved; however, the lower jaw is missing . Due to the covering with younger layers, the skull is somewhat crushed, the upper jaw and the roof of the mouth are somewhat displaced. A larger part of the right parietal bone is missing, as are the maxillary teeth and the left zygomatic arch . Ox teeth and some stone tools , especially scrapers, were recovered with the skull .

features

According to the first description , the skull shows features of Homo erectus , in particular a skull bulge and the comparatively strong bulges above the eyes . Other features are similar to those of modern humans ( Homo sapiens ), such as the face with only slightly protruding cheekbones and flat nose bones . With a volume of 1100 to 1200 cm³, the skull volume is somewhat smaller than that of Homo sapiens , but corresponds to the finds of the late Homo heidelbergensis known from Europe . The anatomy of the skull and the shape of the roof of the skull differ from early European hominini finds such as those from Petralona and Atapuerca as well as from Neanderthal skulls; There are similarities with the so-called Yunxian man .

Due to its modern features, the fossil was interpreted by its Chinese editors as archaic Homo sapiens . Its age was dated to 300,000 to 260,000 years by means of thorium dating on the tooth of a woolly rhinoceros , which was found in the same layer context as the skull - to the late Middle Pleistocene ; In 1994 uranium-lead dating of a bovine tooth showed an age of 209,000 ± 23,000 years. The skull would be about the same age as the European Homo steinheimensis , which also has a comparable skull volume. The paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer pointed out in 2012 that the fossil could possibly belong to the Denisova people .

See also

literature

  • Y. Wang et al .: (1979) Discovery of Dali fossil man and its preliminary study. In: Kexue Tongbao , Volume 24, 1979, pp. 303-306
  • Xinshi Wu and Y. You: A preliminary observation of the Dali man site. In: Vertebrata PalAsiatica , Volume 17, 1979, pp. 294-303
  • Xinshi Wu: (1981) A well-preserved cranium of an archaic type of early Homo sapiens from Dali, China. In: Scientia Sinica , Volume 24, 1981, pp. 530-539

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Le site de Tianshuigou or site de l'Homme de Dali
  2. ↑ Cihai ("Sea of ​​Words"), Shanghai cishu chubanshe, Shanghai 2002, ISBN 7-5326-0839-5 , p. 270
  3. ^ A b Peter Brown: Dali archaic Homo sapiens. Retrieved January 13, 2016 (Detailed description of the skull with photos, University of New England (Australia) ).
  4. ^ Ian Tattersall : The Strange Case of the Rickety Cossack - and Other Cautionary Tales from Human Evolution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2015, p. 144, ISBN 978-1-137-27889-0
  5. ↑ Wu Xinzhi : A well-preserved cranium of an archaic type of early Homo sapiens from Dali, China. In: Scientia Sinica , Vol. 24, No. 4.1981, pp. 530-541, PMID 6789450 .
  6. ↑ Gongming Yin, Hua Zhao, Jinhui Yin and Yanchou Lu: Chronology of the stratum containing the skull of the Dali Man. In: Chinese Science Bulletin. Volume 47, No. 15, 2002, pp. 1302-1307, doi: 10.1360 / 02tb9289
  7. ↑ Peter Brown: Chinese Middle Pleistocene hominids and modern human origins in east Asia. In: Lawrence Barham and Kate Robson Brown (Eds.): Human Roots. Africa and Asia in the Middle Pleistocene. Western Academic & Specialist Publishers, Bristol 2001, p. 141, ISBN 978-0953541843 , full text (PDF; 3.5 MB)
  8. ↑ Chris Stringer: The status of Homo heidelbergensis (Schoetensack 1908). In: Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews. Volume 21, No. 3, 2012, pp. 101-107, doi: 10.1002 / evan.21311
    The science journalist Ed Yong had already argued a year earlier: Patchwork people: Our hybrid origins. In: New Scientist . Volume 211, No. 2823, 2011, p. 37.

Coordinates: 34 ° 52 ′ 0 ″  N , 109 ° 44 ′ 0 ″  E