Lower jaw of Mala Balanica

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The BH-1 fossil, a fragment of a lower jaw from the Mala Balanica cave discovered in 2008
The lower jaw of Mauer , 1908 ( George Grant MacCurdy : Recent discoveries bearing on the antiquity of man in Europe , in: Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution 1909, Washington 1910, pp. 531-583, here: Plate 13 , after p. 571 - digitized version )

The lower jaw of Mala Balanica was discovered in 2008 in layer 3b of the Mala Balanica Cave (43 ° 20.211 ′ N, 22 ° 5.115 ′ E), a two-cave system in the Sićevo Gorge, about 100 m above the Nišava in Serbia . The cave entrance looks south-southwest over the valley, only 7 m from the entrance to the larger Velika Balanica cave. It is a fragment of a human left mandible with three still in situ contained molars . It is the oldest well-dated human remains in Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The fragment is extremely fragile due to the ingress of water. The corpus is between 31.2 and 34.2 mm high and between 17.5 and 23.8 mm thick.

The BH-1 fossil belonged to a young adult. In 2013 it was dated to 397,000 to 525,000 years ago, which means that the fragment comes from the same era as the fossil from the Spanish Sima de los Huesos , the lower jaw of Mauer (the type specimen of Homo heidelbergensis ), the French man from Tautavel , the southern Italian Homo cepranensis or the finds from Visogliano in northern Italy . Unlike the fossil from the Sima de los Huesos, the teeth do not show any characteristics of the Neanderthal man ; rather they are to be assigned to a more archaic type. A new study in 2016 showed that there is a greater proximity to Mauer's lower jaw, i.e. to Homo heidelbergensis , and thus also to the man from Arago. The gender could no longer be determined.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Ljilja Cvekic: Balkan caves, gorges were pre-Neanderthal haven , Reuters, June 27, 2008.
  2. ↑ A precise description can be found in Mirjana Roksandic: The Role of the Central Balkans in the Peopling of Europe: Paleoanthropological Evidence , in: Katerina Harvati, Mirjana Roksandic (ed.): Paleoanthropology of the Balkans and Anatolia, Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology , Springer Science + Business Media, Dordrecht 2016, pp. 15–33, here: pp. 24–28.
  3. ↑ Mirjana Roksandic, Dušan Mihailović, Norbert Mercier, Vesna Dimitrijević, Mike W. Morley, Zoran Rakočević, Bojana Mihailović, Pierre Guibert, Jeff Babb: A human mandible (BH-1) from the Pleistocene deposits of Mala Balanica cave (Sićevo Gorge, Niš, Serbia) , in: Journal of Human Evolution 61.2 (2011) 186–196.
  4. ^ William J. Rink, Norbert Mercier, Dušan Mihailović, Mike W. Morley, Jeroen W. Thompson, Mirjana Roksandic: New Radiometric Ages for the BH-1 Hominin from Balanica (Serbia): Implications for Understanding the Role of the Balkans in Middle Pleistocene Human Evolution , in: PLOS One, February 6, 2013.
  5. ^ Matthew M. Skinner, Dorien de Vries, Philipp Gunz, Kornelius Kupczik, R. Paul Klassen, Jean-Jacques Hublin , Mirjana Roksandic: A dental perspective on the taxonomic affinity of the Balanica mandible (BH-1) , in: Journal of Human Evolution 93 (2016) 63-81.