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http://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/oct/17/skull-homo-erectus-human-evolution
Link to video: Fossil skull challenges understanding of human evolution
The spectacular fossilised skull of an ancient human ancestor that died nearly two million years ago has
forced scientists to rethink the story of early human evolution.
Anthropologists unearthed the skull at a site in Dmanisi, a small town in southern Georgia, where other
remains of human ancestors, simple stone tools and long-extinct animals have been dated to 1.8m years
old.
Experts believe the skull is one of the most important fossil finds to date, but it has proved as
controversial as it is stunning. Analysis of the skull and other remains at Dmanisi suggests that
scientists have been too ready to name separate species of human ancestors in Africa. Many of those
species may now have to be wiped from the textbooks.
The latest fossil is the only intact skull ever found of a human ancestor that lived in the early
Pleistocene, when our predecessors first walked out of Africa. The skull adds to a haul of bones
recovered from Dmanisi that belong to five individuals, most likely an elderly male, two other adult
males, a young female and a juvenile of unknown sex.
The five H erectus skulls found in Dmanisi, Georgia. Photograph: Ponce de Leon, Zollikofe/University
of Zurich
The site was a busy watering hole that human ancestors shared with giant extinct cheetahs, sabretoothed cats and other beasts. The remains of the individuals were found in collapsed dens where
carnivores had apparently dragged the carcasses to eat. They are thought to have died within a few
hundred years of one another.
"Nobody has ever seen such a well-preserved skull from this period," said Christoph Zollikofer, a
professor at Zurich University's Anthropological Institute, who worked on the remains. "This is the first
complete skull of an adult early Homo. They simply did not exist before," he said. Homo is the genus
of great apes that emerged around 2.4m years ago and includes modern humans.
Other researchers said the fossil was an extraordinary discovery. "The significance is difficult to
overstate. It is stunning in its completeness. This is going to be one of the real classics in
paleoanthropology," said Tim White, an expert on human evolution at the University of California,
Berkeley.
But while the skull itself is spectacular, it is the implications of the discovery that have caused scientists
in the field to draw breath. Over decades excavating sites in Africa, researchers have named half a
dozen different species of early human ancestor, but most, if not all, are now on shaky ground.
The most recently unearthed individual had a long face and big teeth, but the smallest braincase of all
five H erectus skulls found at the site. Photograph: Georgian National Museum
The remains at Dmanisi are thought to be early forms of Homo erectus, the first of our relatives to have
body proportions like a modern human. The species arose in Africa around 1.8m years ago and may
have been the first to harness fire and cook food. The Dmanisi fossils show that H erectus migrated as
far as Asia soon after arising in Africa.
The latest skull discovered in Dmanisi belonged to an adult male and was the largest of the haul. It had
a long face and big, chunky teeth. But at just under 550 cubic centimetres, it also had the smallest
braincase of all the individuals found at the site. The dimensions were so strange that one scientist at
the site joked that they should leave it in the ground.
The odd dimensions of the fossil prompted the team to look at normal skull variation, both in modern
humans and chimps, to see how they compared. They found that while the Dmanisi skulls looked
different to one another, the variations were no greater than those seen among modern people and
among chimps.
The scientists went on to compare the Dmanisi remains with those of supposedly different species of
human ancestor that lived in Africa at the time. They concluded that the variation among them was no
greater than that seen at Dmanisi. Rather than being separate species, the human ancestors found in
Africa from the same period may simply be normal variants of H erectus.
"Everything that lived at the time of the Dmanisi was probably just Homo erectus," said Prof Zollikofer.
"We are not saying that palaeoanthropologists did things wrong in Africa, but they didn't have the
reference we have. Part of the community will like it, but for another part it will be shocking news."
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Christoph Zollikofer, a professor at Zurich University's Anthropological Institute, said, "Nobody has
ever seen such a well-preserved skull from this period. This is the first complete skull of an adult early
Homo. They simply did not exist before. His awe was echoed by Tim White, from the University of
California, Berkeley, who said, "The significance is difficult to overstate. It is stunning in its
completeness. This is going to be one of the real classics in paleoanthropology." The Dmanisi bones are
believed to be remnants of Homo erectus, the first ancestor who resembled modern humans and
originated in Africa.
Zollikofer continued, "Everything that lived at the time of the Dmanisi was probably just Homo erectus.
We are not saying that palaeoanthropologists did things wrong in Africa, but they didn't have the
reference we have. Part of the community will like it, but for another part it will be shocking news."
The leader of the Dmanisi excavations, David Lordkipanidze, said, "If you found the Dmanisi skulls at
isolated sites in Africa, some people would give them different species names. But one population can
have all this variation. We are using five or six names, but they could all be from one lineage."
Lordkipanidze theorized that the belief that Australopithecus sediba was a direct ancestor of humans
was now probably wrong.
The consequences of the Dmanisi discovery could mean that species such as Homo rudolfensis, Homo
gautengensis, Homo ergaster, and possibly Homo habilis would be dismissed.
White explained:
Some palaeontologists see minor differences in fossils and give them labels, and that has resulted in the
family tree accumulating a lot of branches. The Dmanisi fossils give us a new yardstick, and when you
apply that yardstick to the African fossils, a lot of that extra wood in the tree is dead wood. It's armwaving.
But Chris Stringer, head of human origins at the Natural History Museum in London, took issue with
the idea that Homo Erectus was solely responsible for the ancestry of humans, saying:
I think they will be proved right that some of those early African fossils can reasonably join a
variable Homo erectus species. But Africa is a huge continent with a deep record of the earliest
stages of human evolution, and there certainly seems to have been species-level diversity there
prior to two million years ago. So I still doubt that all of the 'early Homo' fossils can reasonably
be lumped into an evolving Homo erectus lineage. We need similarly complete African fossils
from two to 2.5m years ago to test that idea properly.
Lee Berger, at the University of Witwatersrand, who discovered the species Australopithecus sediba,
took issue with the conclusion drawn by the Dmanisis team. He said:
This is a fantastic and important discovery, but I don't think the evidence they have lives up to
this broad claim they are making. They say this falsifies that Australopithecus sediba is the
ancestor of Homo. The very simple response is, no it doesn't. What all this screams out for is
more and better specimens. We need skeletons, more complete material, so we can look at them
from head to toe. Any time a scientist says 'we've got this figured out' they are probably wrong.
It's not the end of the story.
David Lordkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum, holding a well-preserved skull from
1.8 million years ago found found in the remains of a medieval hilltop city in Dmanisi on October 18,
2013 (AFP Photo / Vano Shlamov)
A 1.8 million-year-old skull found in Georgia could turn current understanding of evolution on its head.
A new study claims that early man did not come from Africa as seven species, but was actually a single
homo erectus with variations in looks.
The case revolves around an early human skull found in a stunningly well-preserved state at an
archaeological dig at the site of the medieval hill city of Dmanisi in Georgia, a study in the journal
Science revealed on Thursday.
Stone tools were found next to the remains, indicating that the species hunted large carnivorous prey,
including probably saber-toothed tigers.
A team of scientists spent over eight years studying the find, whose original date of excavation was
2005. Its jawbone was actually discovered back in 2000, but only recently have the parts been
assembled to produce a complete skull.
New dating technology allowed scientists to establish that these early humans come from around 1.8
million years ago. Near to the bone fragments were the remains of huge prehistoric predators; the area
is next to a river and was full of them, as they encountered humans in fights to the death.
The skull has a tiny brain about a third of the size of our modern Homo sapiens incarnation; it also has
protruding brows, jutting jaws and other characteristics we have come to expect from lesser developed
prehistoric humans.
But the surprising revelation came when the skull was placed next to four other skulls discovered
within a 100-kilometer radius. They vary so much in appearance that it brings into question whether the
current understanding of species variation is correct.
Traditional theories accept a whole plethora of stand-alone species but the new find strongly hints that
the five remains were all one, but with striking differences in bone structure that we have come to
expect only from our own complex kind.
This handout photo received October 17, 2013 shows a complete, approximately 1.8-million-year-old
hominid skull from Dmanisi, Georgia (AFP Photo / Georgian National Museum / Handout)
Director of the Georgian National Museum and lead researcher, David Lordkipanidze, has come out
with the claim that the find is "the richest and most complete collection of indisputable early Homo
remains from any one site."
"Dmansi is a unique snapshot of time maybe a time capsule that preserves things from 1.8 million
years ago," he told AFP.
Adding weight to the new hypothesis, co-author of the study, Christoph Zollikofer of the University of
Zurich, judged that despite the striking dissimilarities we know that these individuals came from the
same location and the same geological time, so they could, in principle, represent a single population
of a single species.
The differences in the skulls eyebrow ridges, jaws and other features were all consistent with what
paleontologists expect of variations within the same species.
"The five Dmanisi individuals are conspicuously different from each other, but not more different than
any five modern human individuals, or five chimpanzee individuals, from a given population,"
Zollikofer continued.
This has led scientists to conclude that, while previously we thought that intra-species variation was an
exception, it could very well be a rule instead.
For decades researchers would separate all types of humans originating in Africa into separate subgroups with examples including the Homo habilis, the Homo rudolfensis, and so on. The new
hypothesis suggests these could all just be Homo erectus, with the regular human variation in bone
structure we witness in our own Homo sapiens peers. 3D modeling shows this clearly.
It also challenges the notion that we needed a larger cranial capacity or brain in order to be
intelligent enough to use complex tools, hunt large prey and migrate to distant continents. It appears the
humans found at the Georgian site actually migrated to Asia despite not being very bright.
Milford Wolpoff of the University of Michigan told AFP that the team was thrilled about the
conclusion they came to. It backs up what we found as well. He was working with a colleague from
Wellesley College during a study they published a year ago, which also targeted statistical variations in
characteristics of skulls from Georgia and East Africa considered to be one of the cradles of human
civilization.
The study suggested active inter-species breeding was commonplace back in those days.
"Everyone knows today you could find your mate from a different continent and it is normal for people
to marry outside their local group, outside their religion, outside their culture[but] what this really
helps show is that this has been the human pattern for most of our history, at least outside of Africa,
Wolpoff explained.
However, challengers to the hypothesis believe otherwise. Their main qualm with the hypothesis is that
the skull may simply have belonged to a new species of human not a variation of Homo erectus.
Bernard Wood of George Washington University believes the conclusions of the Dmanisi research team
to be misguided.
"What they have is a creature that we have not seen evidence of before, Wood said in reference to the
small head but human-looking body of the early hominid.
Wood feels that the small human has been deprived of what could rightfully be a separate Homo a
Homo georgicus.
However, this matters little to the case at hand that a new form of human has been discovered and that
its practices strongly suggest that its life patterns and differences in features very closely mimicked
what we see today in our modern selves.
Homo erectus is arguably the earliest species in the human lineage to have so many human-like
qualities. Earlier hominins had important similarities with living humans, like bipedality, and H. erectus
still had a long evolutionary path to become like you and me, but the fossils assigned to H. erectus
display a number of new and distinctly modern human traits.
Homo erectus is often referred to as the first cosmopolitan hominin lineage, meaning the first hominin
species whose geographic range had expanded beyond a single continental region. While fossil remains
from H. erectus are found in Africa, like those of earlier hominins, they have also been identified at
fossil sites widely dispersed across Eurasia (Figure 1, Table 1).
Key Fossils
1.9 1.2
1.9 0.7
OH 9, OH 12
1.8 1.7
Dmanisi, Georgia
1.8 1.6
SK 847
1.8 0.9
Sangiran/Trinil, Indonesia
Ceprano, Italy
Ceprano 1
0.8 0.4
Zhoukoudian, China
0.8 0.6
Bodo, Ethiopia
Bodo
0.6 0.3
Atapuerca, Spain
0.3 0.1
Jinniushan, China
Jinniushan
0.2 0.05
Ngandong, Indonesia
Ngandong 1, 9, 10, 11
Table 1: Key Homo erectus fossil sites. A partial list of key Homo erectus fossil
localities, and some of the key specimens preserved at each. Exact dates are difficult
to obtain for many of these localities, so the above dates represent best approximate
ranges. In some cases, such as Olduvai Gorge and Koobi Fora, fossils have been
recovered from many individual localities within the area, spanning a large range of
dates.
There are a number of fascinating evolutionary questions that can be asked of H. erectus. The species
was not only geographically widespread, it also had a long temporal span in the hominin fossil record
(Anton 2003). With its earliest appearance in the fossil record from localities in the Lake Turkana
Basin, Kenya, sometime around two million years ago, H. erectus populations persisted until near the
end of the Pleistocene, as evidenced by fossils from Southeast Asia. Homo erectus thus presents
paleoanthropologists with the challenge of trying to interpret fossil variation in the context of both
widespread geographic and temporal distribution.
Furthermore, the expansion of H. erectus across a large range of environments suggests a change in the
ecology of this lineage relative to early hominins, a change that certainly has significance for how
evolutionary forces acted to shape the pattern of variation we observe in the fossil lineage.
These are some of the questions that researchers ask of H. erectus fossils: How did the ecology of
Homo erectus differ from that of preceding hominins? What are the characteristics of H. erectus that
allowed it to expand across different habitats throughout portions of Eurasia and Africa? What
limitations constrained the expansion and evolution of H. erectus in the Pleistocene? What role did
behavioral and technological innovation play in establishing the complex and geographically
widespread evolutionary pattern of H. erectus? How might we describe and explain the evolutionary
pattern of H. erectus?
Humans are widespread and variable today, but much of the variation observed across contemporary
populations is the result of relatively recent events in the past 100,000 years of our evolutionary history.
Patterns of variation in H. erectus occurred on a time scale as long as a million years, and may have
been different from those we observe today. This presents a challenge for researchers in terms of how
we explain the pattern of variation seen in H. erectus, but also presents an opportunity to study how
evolutionary forces operate across such scales.
Figure 3: The Nariokotome Homo erectus skeleton (a.k.a. The Turkana Boy; KNM-WT
15000).
Dated to between 1.5 and 1.6 mya, and discovered on the western side of Lake Turkana
Kenya in the mid 1980s by Kamoya Kimeu, leader of the paleontological team dubbed the
'Hominid Gang.'
2012 Nature Education Courtesy of Alan Walker. All rights reserved.
The intensified niche goes hand in hand with the expansion in brain and body size. Larger bodies, and
longer limbs in particular, increase locomotor efficiency (Pontzer et al. 2010). Homo erectus could
cover more ground on a day-to-day basis, through walking or running, than smaller hominins and with
lower energy cost. In addition, the larger brain gave these hominins better capabilities for processing
complex ecological information across the more expansive terrain containing higher quality food items.
For example, there is clear evidence of H. erectus accessing medium- and large-sized animal carcasses
for meat, through hunting and/or scavenging, in the form of fossil remains of animals with cut marks
left by butchery. This behavior, regularly accessing animal carcasses, is an ecological change from
earlier hominins (Link to Pobiner's NKP article). While the earliest H. erectus specimens are found in
association with very basic stone tools, typically referred to as the Oldowan stone tool industry, by 1.5
million years ago populations of H. erectus were creating a more complex and typologically codified
set of tools that we refer to as the Acheulean industry (Bar-Yosef & Belfer-Cohen 2001).
Summary
Homo erectus represents a significant transformation from previous hominins, like the australopiths, to
a species much more similar to modern humans. Relative to their australopith forebears, Homo erectus
was bigger, smarter, and more able to occupy and survive in differing landscapes in a changing world.
The movement towards a more ecologically intense, cognitively reliant, and behaviorally malleable
adaptive pattern set the stage for the evolutionary change that followed in the Pleistocene, up to and
including the present. In many ways, modern humans are just an updated version of our H. erectus
ancestors.
Glossary
Acheulean - Lower and Middle Pleistocene hominin stone tool industry. The Acheulean
tool complex is often characterized by a high percentage of bifacially flaked stone cores
and the presence of tear-drop shaped tools referred to as hand axes'.
ancestral - A trait that is present in the common ancestor of a species. The large body size of
contemporary humans is ancestral, as evidenced by the presence of this feature in Homo erectus.
derived - A trait that is not present in the common ancestor of a species, but is newly arisen. The
marked encephalization of Homo erectus is a derived characteristic relative to earlier, small-brained
hominins.
ecological niche - The overall set of relations that defines the place of a species within its environment.
This includes the other organisms a species interacts with, such as prey or predators, as well as the
physical habitats a species utilizes in its existence.
endocasts - A natural fossil cast formed within the endocranial space of a skull. When present,
endocasts provide some resolution on the size, shape, and surface structures of the brain in fossil taxa.
encephalization - Expansion of the brain relative to body size. Encephalization represents an increase
in proportional resources dedicated to the growth, development, and maintenance of brain activities.
masticatory - Of, or relating to, the chewing structures of an organism.
Oldowan - The earliest well-characterized hominin stone tool industry, present in the terminal Pliocene
and Lower Pleistocene. This tool complex is characterized by a simple core-flake set of tools.
polytypic - The presence of multiple forms of a lineage across a species' range.
sexual dimorphism - The characteristic differences between males and females within a species. Often
this refers specifically to size sexual dimorphism, the average difference in body mass or skeletal size
between males and females of a species.