Tag: Homo erectus

The first Europeans at the Ukraine-Hungary border

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Until this year, the earliest date recorded for the presence of humans in Europe came from the Sierra de Atapuerca in the Province of Burgos, northern Spain. The Sima del Elefante cave yielded a fossil mandible of a human dubbed Homo antecessor from which an age between 1.2 to 1.1 Ma was estimated from a combination of palaeomagnetism, cosmogenic nuclides and stratigraphy. Stone tools from the Vallonet Cave in southern France are around the same age. There is a time gap of about 200 ka before the next sign of human ventures into Europe, probably coinciding with an extreme ice age. They reappear in the form of stone tools and even footprints that they left between 1.0 to 0.78 Ma in ancient river sediments beneath the crumbling sea cliffs of Happisburgh in Norfolk, England. Although no human fossils were preserved, they too have been assigned to H. antecessor.

Topographic map of Europe (click to see full resolution in a new window). The Carpathian Mountains form an arc surrounding the Pannonian Basin (Hungarian Plains) just below centr. Korolevo and other Homo erectus and H. antecessor sites are marked by red spots (Credit: Wikipedia Commons)

In 1974 Soviet archaeologists discovered a site bearing stone tools by the River Tisza at Korolevo in the Carpathian Mountains close to the borders between Ukraine, Romania and Hungary. Korolevo lies at the northeastern edge of the Pannonian Basin that dominates modern Hungary. Whoever left the tools was on the westward route to a huge, fertile area whose game might support them and their descendants. The route along the Tisza leads to the River Danube and then to its headwaters far to the west. Going eastwards leads to the plains north of the Black Sea and eventually via Georgia to the Levant. On that route lies Dmanisi in Georgia, famous for the site where remains of the first hominins (H. erectus, dated at ~1.8 Ma) to leave Africa were found (see: Consider Homo erectus for what early humans achived). The tools from Korolevo are primitive, but have remained undated since 1974. 50 years on, Roman Garba of the Czech Academy of Sciences with colleagues from Czechia, Ukraine, Germany, Australia, South Africa and Denmark have finally resolved their antiquity (Garba, R. and 12 others 2024. East-to-west human dispersal into Europe 1.4 million years ago. Nature v. 627, p. 805–810; DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07151-3). Without fossils it is not possible to decide if the tool makers were H. erectus or H. antecessor.

The method used to date the site is based on radioactive 10Be and 26Al formed from oxygen and silicon in quartz grains by cosmic ray bombardment while the grains are at the surface. Since the half life of 26Al (0.7 Ma) is less than that of 10Be (1.4 Ma), after burial the 26Al/10Be ratio decreases and is a guide to the age of the sediment layer that contains the quartz grains. In this case the ag is quite precise (1.42 ± 0.28 Ma). The decreasing age of H. erectus or H. antecessor sites from the 1.8 Ma of Dmanisi in Georgia in the east, through 1.4 Ma (Korolevo) to 1.2 in Spain and France could mark the slow westward migration of the earliest Europeans. It is tempting to suggest possible routes as Garba et al. have. But such sparse and widely separated sites can yield very little certainty. Indeed, it is equally likely that each known site marks the destination of separate migrations at different times that ended in population collapse. The authors make an interesting point regarding the Korolevo population. They were there at a time when three successive interglacials were significantly warmer than the majority during the Early Pleistocene. Also glacial cycles then had ~41 ka time spans before the transition to 100 ka about 1 Ma ago. Unfortunately, no information about the ecosystem that the migrants exploited is available

See also: Prostak, S. 2024. 1.4-Million-Year-Old Stone Tools Found in Ukraine Document Earliest Hominin Occupation of Europe. Sci News, 7 March 2024. (includes map showing possible routes of early human dispersal)

Consider Homo erectus …

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Championed as the earliest commonly found human species and, apart from anatomically modern humans (AMH), the most widespread through Africa and Eurasia. It also endured longer (~1.75 Ma) than any other hominin species, appearing first in East Africa around 2 Ma ago, the youngest widely accepted fossil – found in China – being around 250 ka old. The ‘erects’ arguably cooked their food and discovered the use of fire 1.7 to 2 Ma ago. The first fossils discovered in Java by Eugene Dubois are now known to be associated with the oldest-known art (430 to 540 ka) The biggest issue surrounding H. erectus has been its great diversity, succinctly indicated by a braincase capacity ranging from 550 to 1250 cm3: from slightly greater than the best endowed living apes to within the range of AMH. Even the shape of their skulls defies the constraints placed on those of other hominin species. For instance, some have sagittal crests to anchor powerful jaw muscles, whereas others do not. What they all have in common are jutting brow ridges and the absence of chins along with all more recently evolved human species, except for AMH.

This diversity is summed up in 9 subspecies having been attributed to H. erectus, the majority by Chinese palaeoanthropologists. Chinese fossils from over a dozen sites account for most of the anatomical variability, which perhaps even includes Denisovans, though their existence stems only through the DNA extracted from a few tiny bone fragments. So far none of the many ‘erect’ bones from China have been submitted to genetic analysis, so that connection remains to be tested. Several finds of diminutive humans from the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos have been suggested to have evolved from H. erectus in isolation. All in all, the differences among the remains of H. erectus are greater than those used to separate later human species, i.e. archaic AMH, Neanderthals, Denisovans, H. antecessor etc. So it seems strange that H. erectus has not been split into several species instead of being lumped together, in the manner of the recently proposed Homo bodoensis. Another fossil cranium has turned up in central China’s Hubei province, to great excitement even though it has not yet been fully excavated (Lewis, D. 2022. Ancient skull uncovered in China could be million-year-old Homo erectus. Nature News 29 November 2022; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-022-04142-00; see also a video). Chances are that it too will be different from other examples. It also presents a good excuse to consider H. erectus.

Cranium of a Chinese Homo erectus, somewhat distorted by burial, from a site close to the latest find. (Credit: Hubei Museum, Wuhan, China)

The complications began in Africa with H. ergaster, the originator of the bifacial or Acheulean multi-purpose stone tool at around 1.6 Ma (see: Flirting with hand axes; May 2009), the inventor of cooking and discoverer of the controlled use of fire. ‘Action Men’ were obviously smarter than any preceding hominin, possibly because of an increase of cooked protein and plant resources that are more easily digested than in the raw state and so more available for brain growth. The dispute over nomenclature arose from a close cranial similarity of H. ergaster to the H. erectus discovered in Java in the 19th century: H. erectus ergaster is now its widely accepted name. In 1991-5 the earliest recorded hominins outside Africa were found at Dmanisi, Georgia, in sediments dated at around 1.8 Ma (see: First out of Africa; November 2003) Among a large number of bones were five well-preserved skulls, with brain volumes less than 800 cm3 (see: An iconic early human skull; October 2013). These earliest known migrants from Africa were first thought to resemble the oldest humans (H.habilis) because of their short stature, but now are classified as H. erectus georgicus. They encapsulate the issue of anatomical variability among supposed H. erectus fossils, each being very different in appearance, one even showing ape-like features. Another had lost all teeth from the left side of the face, yet had survived long after their loss, presumably because others had cared for the individual.

The great variety of cranial forms of the Asian specimens of H. erectus may reflect a number of factors. The simplest is that continuous presence of a population there for as long as 1.5 Ma inevitably would have resulted in at least as much evolution as stemmed from the erects left behind in Africa, up to and including the emergence of AMH in North Africa about 300 ka ago. If contact with the African human population was lost after 1.8 Ma, the course of human evolution in Africa and Asia would clearly have been different. But that leaves out the possibility of several waves of migrants into Asia that carried novel physiological traits evolved in Africa to mix with those of earlier Asian populations. From about 1 Ma ago a succession of migrations from Africa populated Europe – H. antecessor, H. heidelbergensis, and Neanderthals and then AMH. So a similar succession of migrants could just as well have gone east instead of west on leaving Africa. Asia is so vast that migration may have led different groups to widely separated locations, partially cut-off by mountain ranges and deserts so that it became very difficult for them to maintain genetic contact. Geographic isolation of small groups could lead to accelerated evolution, similar to that which may have led to the tiny H. floresiensis and H. luzonensisdiscovered on Indonesian and Philippine islands.

 Another aspect of the Asian continent is its unsurpassed range of altitude, latitude and climate zones. Its ecologically diversity offers a multitude of food resources, and both climate and elevation differences pose a range of potential stresses to which humans would have had to adapt. The major climate cycles of the Pleistocene would have driven migration across latitudes within the continent, thereby mixing groups with different physical tolerances and diets to which they had adapted. Equally, westward migration was possible using the Indo-Gangetic plains and the shore of the Arabian Sea: yet more opportunities for mixing between established Asians and newly arrived African emigrants.

The early signs of counting and arithmetic?

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Three earlier articles in Earth-logs originally focussed on what I supposed to be ‘ancient abstract art’.  One highlighted a clam shell that bears carefully etched V-shapes found at the type locality for Asian Homo erectus at Trinil on the Solo River, Java, dated between 430 and 540 ka. Another is about parallel lines etched on a piece of defleshed bone from China dated at 78 to 123 ka, which may be a Denisovan artefact. The most complex is a piece of ochre found in the coastal Blombos Cave 300 km east of Cape Town, South Africa in association with tools ascribed to early modern humans who lived there about 73 ka ago. Fascinating as they seemed at the time, they may hold much greater significance about early-human cognitive powers than about mere decoration. That is thanks to recent evaluation of other simple artefacts made of lines and notches by anthropologists, cognitive scientists and psychologists. Their work is summarised in a recent Nature Feature by Colin Barras (Barras, C. 2021. How did Neanderthals and other ancient humans learn to count? Nature, v. 594, p. 22-25; DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-01429-6). The European Research Council recently allocated a €10 million grant to foster research into ‘when, why and how number systems appeared and spread’.

Examples of ancient ‘abstract’ art. Top – V-shaped features inscribed on 430-540 ka freshwater clam from Java; Middle – parallel lines etched through red ochre to show white bone, from a possible Denisovan site in China; Bottom – complex inscription on a tablet of iron-rich silcrete from South Africa

Straight lines and patterns made from them are definitely deliberate, whatever their antiquity. In recent times, such devices have been used by artists to render mental images, moods and thoughts as simplified abstractions: hence ‘abstract’ art, such as that of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich. The term also applies to the dribbles and drabbles of Jackson Pollock and many more styles. But these works are a very recent evolutionary development out of earlier schools of art. So deliberate geometric shapes and arrangements of lines that are many millennia old cannot simply be termed ‘abstract art’. It is certainly not easy to see how they evolved into the magnificence of Palaeolithic figurative cave art that started at least 40 thousand years ago; Yet they are not ‘doodles’. Being so deliberate suggests that they represented something to their makers. The question is, ‘What?’

The research summarised by Barras is mainly that of Francisco d’Errico of The University of Bordeaux, France and colleagues from Canada and Italy (d’Errico, F. et al. 2018. From number sense to number symbols. An archaeological perspective. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, v. 373, article 2160518; DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2016.0518). They focused their work on two remarkable artefacts. The oldest (72 to 60 ka), from a cave near Angoulême in France, is a fragment of a hyena’s thigh bone that carries nine notches. It is associated with stone tools almost certainly made by Neandethals. The other, from the Border Cave rock shelter in KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa, is a 44 to 42 ka old baboon’s shin bone, which carries a row of 29 prominent notches, and a number of less distinct, roughly parallel scratches. The rock shelter contains remains of anatomically modern humans and a very diverse set of other artefacts that closely resemble some used by modern San people.

Top: notched hyena femur bone fragment associated with Neanderthal tools from SW France. Bottom: notched baboon shin bone from Border Cave, South Africa. Scale bars(Credit: F. d’Errica and L. Backwell)

Microscopic examination of the notches made by a Neanderthal suggest that all 9 notches were cut at the same time, using the same stone blade. Those on the Border Cave shin bone suggest that they were made using four distinctly different tools on four separate occasions. Are both objects analogous to tally sticks; i.e. to count or keep a record of things as an extension to memory? There are other known examples, such as a 30 ka-old  wolf’s radial bone from the Czech Republic having notches in groups of five, suggesting a record of counting on fingers. Yet very similar devices, made in recent times by the original people of Australia, were not used for keeping count, but to help travellers commit a verbal message to memory enabling them to recount it later.

Do read Barras’s summary and the original paper by d’Errico et al. to get an expanded notion of the arguments being debated. They emerge from the truly novel idea that just because the makers of such objects lived tens or even hundreds of thousands of years ago that doesn’t make them intellectually lacking. Imagining in the manner of Victorian scientists that ancient beings such as Neanderthals and H. erectus must have been pretty dim is akin to the prejudice of European colonialists that people of colour or with non-European cultures were somehow inferior, even non-human. To me it is admirable that the European Research Council has generously funded further research in this field at a time when research funding in the UK, especially for the disciplines involved, has been decimated by those who demanded an exit from the EU.

The older Trinil and Blombos patterns appear yet more sophisticated. The pattern on the latter looks very like the kind of thing that someone in a prison cell might draw to keep track of time. It also incorporates the zig-zag element engraved on the Trinil clam shell. Remember that the word ‘Exchequer’ is derived from a tax audit during the reign of Henry I of England that was conducted on a counting board whose surface had a checked pattern

The last known Homo erectus

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There are a lot of assumptions made about Homo erectus and, indeed, there is much confusion surrounding the species (see: various items in Human evolution and migrations logs for 2001, 2002, 2003 and several other years). For a start, the name derives from Eugene Dubois’s 1891 discovery of several hominin cranial fragments in sediments deposited by the Solo River in Java. Dubois was the first to recognise in ‘Java Man’ the human-ape ‘missing link’ about which Charles Darwin speculated in his The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Dubois named the beings Pithecanthropus (now Homo) erectus. Once the “multiregional” versus “out-of-Africa” debate about the origin of anatomically modern humans (AMH) emerged after a variety of H. erectus-like fossils had also turned up in Africa and Europe, as well as in East and SE Asia, ‘Java Man’ was adopted by the multiregionalists as ‘evidence’ for separate evolution of AMH in Asia. Such a view remains adhered to by a tenacious number of Chinese palaeoanthropologists, but by virtually no-one else.

Reconstruction of the Nariokotome Boy from the skeleton found in the Turkana Basin of Kenya (credit: Atelier Daynes/Science Photo Library)

The earliest of the African ‘erects’ were distinguished as H. ergaster, represented by the 1.6 Ma old, almost intact skeleton of Nariokotome Boy from the Turkana area of Kenya. In Africa the specific names ergaster and erectus often seem to be used as synonyms, whereas similar-looking fossils from Asia are almost always referred to as ‘Asian ­H. erectus’. Matters became even more confusing when the earliest human migrants from Africa to Eurasia were discovered at Dmanisi in Georgia (see; Human evolution and migrations logs for 2002, 2003, 2007, 2013). Anatomically they deviate substantially from both H. ergaster and Asian erectus – and from each other! – and at 1.8 Ma they are very old indeed. Perhaps as a palliative in the academic rows that broke out following their discovery, for the moment they are called Homo erectus georgicus; a sub-species. But, then, how can Asian H. erectus be regarded as their descendants. Yet anatomically erectus-like fossils are known in East and SE Asia from 1.5 Ma onwards.

There is another mystery. Homo ergaster/erectus in Africa made distinctive tools, typified by the bifacial Acheulian hand axe. Their tool kit remained substantially the same for more than a million years, and was inherited by all the descendants of H. erectus in Africa and Europe: by H. antecessor, heidelbergensis, Neanderthals and early AMH. Yet in Asia, such a technology has not been discovered at sites older than around 250 thousand years. Either no earlier human migrants into Asia made and carried such artefacts or stone tools were largely abandoned by early Asian humans in favour of those more easily made from woods, for instance bamboo.

In 1996 the youngest Solo River sediments that had yielded H. erectus remains in the 1930s were dated using electron-spin resonance and uranium-series methods. The results suggested occupation by ‘erects’ between 53 and 27 ka, triggering yet more astonishment, because fully modern humans had by then also arrived in Indonesia. Could anatomically modern humans have co-existed with a species whose origin went back to almost two million years beforehand? It has taken another two decades for this perplexing issue to be clarified – to some extent. The previous dates were checked using more precise versions of the original geochronological methods covering a wider range of sediment strata (Rizal, Y. et al. 2019. Last appearance of Homo erectus at Ngandong, Java, 117,000–108,000 years ago. Nature, published online; DOI:10.1038/s41586-019-1863-2). No AMH presence in Asia is known before about 80 ka, so can the astonishment be set aside? Possibly, but what is known for sure from modern and ancient DNA comparisons is that early modern human migrants interbred with a more ancient Asian group, the Denisovans. At present that group is only known from a site in Siberia and another in Tibet through a finger bone and a few molar teeth that yielded DNA significantly different from both living humans and ancient Neanderthals. So we have no tangible evidence of what the Denisovans looked like, unlike Asian H. erectus of whom there are many substantial fossils. Yet DNA has not been extracted from any of them. That is hardly surprising for the Indonesian specimens because hot and humid conditions cause DNA to break down quickly and completely. There is a much better chance of extracting genomes from the youngest H. erectus fossils from higher latitudes in China. Once that is achieved, we will know whether they are indeed erects or can be matched genetically with Denisovans.

See also:  Price, M. 2019. Ancient human species made ‘last stand’ 100,000 years ago on Indonesian island (Science)

Pre-sapiens hominins reached North America?

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In 1991-2 palaeontologists excavated a site near San Diego, California where broken bones had been found. These turned out to be the disarticulated remains of an extinct mastodon. One feature of the site was the association of several large cobbles with bones of large limbs that seemed to have been smashed either to extract marrow or as source of tool-making material. The cobbles showed clear signs or pounding, such as loss of flakes – one flake could be fitted exactly to a scar in a cobble – pitted surfaces and small radiating fractures. The damage to one cobble suggested that it had been used as an anvil, the others being hammer stones.  Broken pieces of rock identical to the hammer stones were found among the heap of bones. No other artefacts were found, and the bones show no sign of marks left by cutting meat from them with stone tools. The breakage patterns of the bones included spiral fractures that experimental hammering of large elephant and cow bones suggest form when bone is fresh. Other clear signs of deliberate breakage are impact notches and small bone flakes. Two detached, almost spherical heads of mastodon femora suggest that marrow was the target for the hammering and confirmed the breakage was deliberate.

Mastodon.
Artist’s impression of American mastodon. (credit: Wikipedia)

Since the sediment stratum in which the remains occurred consists of fine sands and silt, typical of a low-energy river system, the chances that the cobbles had been washed into association with the mastodon are very small. The interpretation of the site is that it was the result of opportunistic exploitation of a partial carcase of a young adult mastodon by humans. In the early 1990s attempts were made to date the bones using the radiocarbon method, but failed due to insufficient preserved collagen. That the site may have been much older than the period of known occupation of North America by ancestors of native people (post 14.5 ka) emerged from attempts at optically stimulated luminescence dating of sand grains that can suggest the age of burial. These suggested burial by at least 60 to 70 ka ago. It was only when the uranium-series disequilibrium method was used on bone fragments that full significance of the site emerged. The results indicated that they had been buried at 130.7±9.4 ka (Holen, S.R. and 10 others 2017. A 130,000-year-old archaeological site in southern California, USA. Nature, v.  544, p. 479—493; doi:10.1038/nature22065 – full paper and supplements available free)

Not only is the date almost ten times that of the earliest widely accepted signs of Homo sapiens in the Americas, the earliest anatomically modern humans known to have left Africa are around the same age, but restricted to the Levant. The earliest evidence that modern humans had reached East Asia and Australasia through their eastward migration out of Africa is no more than 60 ka. The date from southern California is around the start of the interglacial (Eemian) before the one in which we live now. It may well have been possible then, as ~14 ka ago, to walk across the Bering Straits due to low sea level, or even by using coast-hugging boats – hominins had reached islands in the Mediterranean and the Indonesian peninsula certainly by 100 ka, and probably earlier. But whoever exploited the Californian mastodon marrow must have been cold-adapted to achieve such a migration. While the authors speculate about ‘archaic’ H. sapiens the best candidates would have been hominins known to have been present in East Asia: H. erectus, Neaderthals and the elusive Denisovans.

Surely there will be reluctance to accept such a suggestion without further evidence, such as tools and, of course, hominin skeletal remains. But these long-delayed findings seem destined to open up a new horizon for American palaeoanthropology, at least in California.

You can find more information on hominin migration here.

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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2129042-first-americans-may-have-been-neanderthals-130000-years-ago/

Hobbit time

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A few months after the diminutive hominin fossil Homo floresiensis, which because of its relatively large feet was quickly dubbed the ‘Hobbit’, turned out to be considerably older than previously thought it hit has the headlines again because its ancestors may have colonized the Indonesian island of Flores far earlier still. A pair of articles in the 9 June 2016 issue of Nature consider evidence from another site on the island where fluvial sediments offer more easily interpreted stratigraphy than the complex Liang Bua cave assemblage where the original skeletal remains were unearthed. The site in the So’a Basin became an important target for excavation following the discovery there in the 1950’s of stone artefacts, east of Wallace’s Line – a fundamental faunal and floral divide once thought to be due to the difficulty of crossing a deep, current-plagued channel in the Indonesian archipelago. The unexpected presence of artefacts drew palaeoanthropologists from far afield, but it was almost 50 years later before their exploration yielded hominin remains.

English: homo from flores
Homo floresiensis (credit: Wikipedia)

One of the papers reports sparse new finds of hominin material from the So’a Basin, a fragment of mandible and 6 isolated teeth thought to be from at least three individuals (van den Bergh, G.D. et al., 2016. Homo floresiensis-like fossils from the early Middle Pleistocene of Flores. Nature, v.  534, p. 245-248). The other covers newly discovered artefacts, the stratigraphic and palaeoecological setting, and radiometric dates of the finds (Brumm, A. and 22 others, 2016. Age and context of the oldest known hominin fossils from Flores. Nature, v.  534, p. 249-253). The jaw fragment shows signs of having once held a wisdom tooth, showing that it belonged to an adult. Yet although it resembles the dentition of the younger Liang Bua specimens, it seems more primitive and is even smaller. The other dental finds are most likely to be deciduous teeth of juveniles. Fission-track, uranium-series and 40Ar/39Ar dating indicates that the fossils entered the sediments about 700 ka ago. But tools and remains of prey animals in deeper sedimentary layers here and at other Flores sites indicate the presence of hominins back as far as about 1 Ma, before which there are no such signs.

So, at least a million years ago Flores was colonised by hominins. Either the original immigrants were uniquely small compared with other hominins of that vintage in Asia and Africa, or within 300 ka they had decreased in size through the evolutionary influence of limited resources on Flores and the process of island dwarfism. The second may also have been influenced by an initially small population of migrants or a later population ‘bottleneck’ that added a loss of genetic variability – a founder effect.   These two alternatives may point respectively to either the even earlier migration out of Africa and across most of Asia of perhaps H. habilis, or the dwarfing of a limited population of H. erectus who made their way there from their known occupation of Java. The authors painstaking analysis of the meagre remains suggest a closer dental resemblance to Asian Homo erectus than to earlier African hominins, so the second alternative seems more likely. However, even that scenario poses palaeoanthropology with a major problem; yet another evolutionary process that helps cryptify the links among our earlier relatives. (See also: Gomez-Robles, A., 2016. The dawn of Homo floresiensis. Nature, v.  534, p. 188-189.)

Art from half a million years ago

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original fossils of Pithecanthropus erectus (n...
Original fossils of Pithecanthropus erectus (now Homo erectus) found By Eugene Dubois in Java in 1891 (credit: Wikipedia)

Eugene Dubois, an anatomist at the University of Amsterdam in the late 19th century, became enthralled by an idea that humans had evolved in what is now Indonesia, contrary to Charles Darwin’s suggestion of an African origin. So much so that Dubois took the extraordinary step of joining the Dutch army and scrounging a posting to the Dutch East Indies to facilitate his search for a ‘missing link’, accompanied by his wife and newborn daughter. After a four-year quest, in 1891 he discovered the upper cranium and brow of a being that was obviously related to us, but also quite distinct as regards its beetling brow ridges. Pithecanthropus erectus (now Homo erectus) raised a storm of controversy, sadly only resolved in Dubois’s favour after his death in 1940. Yet, as well as mounting the first deliberate search for human ancestors, Dubois collected everything possible in the sediments at Trinil, Java, so in a sense he was also an early palaeoecologist. The collection gathered dust in Leiden for the best part of a century, until archaeologist Josephine Joordens of the University of Leiden took on the task of reviewing its contents in 2007 (Joordens, J.C.A. and 20 others 2014. Homo erectus at Trinil on Java used shells for tool production and engraving. Nature (on-line): doi:10.1038/nature13962).

Progressively enlarged views of freshwater clam from Eugene Dubois's collecti9on from Trimil, showing clear evidence of deliberate engraving. (credit: Joordens et al., 2014 in Nature; photos by Wim Lustenhouwer, VU University Amsterdam
Progressively enlarged views of freshwater clam from Eugene Dubois’s collection from Trinil, showing clear evidence of deliberate engraving. (credit: Joordens et al., 2014 in Nature; photos by Wim Lustenhouwer, VU University Amsterdam)

Homo erectus clearly had a taste for freshwater clams and lots of their shells figure in the Trinil collection: all are of similar large size rather than showing a wide variation according to age, suggesting a shell midden rather than a natural assemblage. A piece of serendipity revealed what may prove to be the anthropological find of the year. High-quality photos of the shells taken by a visiting mollusc specialist showed up evidence that one of them had been meticulously engraved. Its surface had a near-perfectly geometric, zig-zag pattern deeply gouged by someone with a steady hand, who probably used an associated shark’s tooth as a scribing tool. Since the molluscs in life bear a dark, chitinous veneer the etching would have been more striking when freshly made. Another of these sturdy shells also show signs of having had its edge sharpened, suggesting that they were used for tools such as scrapers or graters.

The stratigraphy at Trinil suggested that the engraved shell and tools were coeval with Homo erectus, but that needed proof. Using sediment grains trapped in the shells and a combination of 40Ar/39Ar and thermoluminescence dating, the team have shown that they and the human fossils from Trinil date to between 430 and 540 thousand years ago: at least 350 ka older than the very similar engravings made by an anatomically modern human on ochre that was found at Blombos Cave in South Africa. The next-oldest putative artwork is the controversial ‘Venus’ found at Berekhat Ram on the Israel-Syria border, dated between 250 and 280 ka.

Engraved ochre from Blombos Cave, South Africa. (credit Chris Henshilwood)
Engraved ochre from Blombos Cave, South Africa. (credit: Chris Henshilwood)

Probably the majority of palaeoanthropologists have dismissed humans other than ­H. sapiens as being cognitively incapable of either abstract or figurative art. The general view is that the mental capacity to create art or design began with the creation of the Blombos engraving, was restricted to anatomically modern humans and only exploded in Europe after they had migrated there by about 40 ka. A few argue that portable art, such as the Trinil and Blombos engravings, is bound by its very nature to be rare and easily overlooked. Whether having some use – counting? – merely being the making of an idle ‘doodle’ or expressing some unknowable ritual significance, the Trinil etching is a result of creativity and controlled skill that could only be the product of the H. erectus mind. Moreover, the very close comparison with the 0.35 Ma younger Blombos engraving suggests the product of a consciousness little different from that of our direct ancestors of 75 ka ago.

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Human evolution news

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Since discovery of its fossilised remains in Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores was discovered in 2004 the diminutive Homo floresienesis, dubbed the ‘hobbit’ by the media, has remained a popular news item each time controversies surrounding it have flared. To mark the tenth anniversary  of its publication of a paper describing the remains Nature has summarised the recollections of many of those involved in trying to understand the significance of H. floresiensis (Callaway, E. 2014. Tales of the hobbit. Nature, v. 514, p. 422-426). Two main schools of thought continue in dispute, one holding that it is anatomically so different from anatomically modern humans and earlier members of the genus Homo that it constitutes a new species, despite its youngest member dating back only 18 ka, the other that it is H. sapiens, its tiny size having resulted from some kind of genetic disorder, such as microcephaly or Down’s syndrome. There have been so many attempts to expunge the idea of such an odd fossil cohabiting an island with fully modern humans yet being a different and perhaps extremely archaic species that such an outlook itself seems somewhat pathological.

English: Homo floresiensis, replica Deutsch: H...
Replica of the Homo floresiensis skull from Liang Bua cave, Flores, Indonesia (credit: Wikipedia)

The evidence presented to force H. floresiensis into a deformed human mould has never been convincing, and the best way of combating that view is to document from a ‘non-combatant ‘standpoint the many ways in which its anatomy differs from ours and how it might have arisen; a job to which Chris Stringer of the Museum of Natural History in London is amply qualified (Stringer, S. 2014. Small remains still pose big problems. Nature, v. 514, p. 427-429). He, like the original discoverers, feels this is a case of evolution of small stature due to a limited population being isolated for a long time on a relatively small island, which is just what happened to elephants that colonised Flores to become the pigmy Stegodon that H. floresiensis seemingly hunted. These tiny Flores dwellers (adults were about 1 m tall) used fire and made tools, similar ones dating as far back as ~1 Ma. Stringer mentions the possibility of first human colonisation about that time by Asian H. erectus but also the view that if it happened once there may have been several waves of immigration to Flores. The unusual ‘hobbit’ anatomy is not restricted to tiny size and a small skull and brain cavity (400 cm3), but includes odd hips, wrist bones, shoulder joint and collar bone. In fact the remains bear as much or more resemblance to australopithecines like ‘Lucy’ (3.2 Ma) than to other members of our genus, even H. erectus that has been proposed as its possible ancestor. Could they be far-travelled descendants of the 1.8 Ma old H. georgicus from Dmanisi in Georgia? More fossils clearly need to be found, and Stringer raises the possibility of the search being widened to other islands east of Java, such as Sulawesi, the Philippines and Timor. He hints that in such a tectonically active region tsunamis may have led to animals and humans saving themselves and then being current dispersed on rafts of broken vegetation, rather like some survivors of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami who ended up 150 miles from their homes by such a means.

Another story that is set to ‘run and run’ is that of ‘alien’ DNA in the human genome and productive relations between early out-of-Africa migrants with Neanderthals, Denisovans and perhaps yet a mysterious, earlier human species. The oldest (45 ka) anatomically modern human genome sequence so far charted is from a leg bone found by a mammoth-ivory prospector in Siberian permafrost (Fu, Q. and 27 others 2014. Genome sequence of a 45,000-year-old modern human from western Siberia. Nature, v. 514, p. 445-449). Like a great many living non-Africans this individual carried about 2 % Neanderthal DNA, but unlike living people the 45 ka genome has it in significantly longer segments. That allowed the authors to re-estimate the timing of the genetic flow from Neanderthals into the individual’s ancestors. Previous estimates from living DNA geve the possibility of that being between 37-86 ka, but this closer data suggests that it happened between 7 to 13 ka before the date of the fossil femur, i.e. narrowing it down to between 52 and 58 ka closer to the widely suggested time of African exodus around 60 ka (but see an Earth Pages item from September 2014)

More on human evolution here and here

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An iconic early human skull

Published on by zooks7775 Comments

The earliest known human fossils outside of Africa were found at a site near Dmanisi in Georgia, between 1991 and 2005, following the discovery there in 1984 of primitive stone tools together with early Pleistocene animal bones. The Dmanisi finds occur with those of sabre-toothed cats and giant cheetahs, and so are probably not interments or in some kind of dwelling but were probably dragged into an underground carnivore den.

The five Dmanisi skulls of Homo erectus georgicus (credits; M.S. Ponce de Leon & P.E. Zollkofer, University of Zurich)
The five Dmanisi skulls of Homo erectus georgicus (credits; M.S. Ponce de Leon & P.E. Zollkofer, University of Zurich)

Initially the remains were assigned to a new species – Homo georgicus – but are now believed to be a subspecies of H. erectus. The finds are anatomically rich, with fossils of at least 5 individuals, both male and female, including 5 well-preserved skulls.  Analysing them has been a long process. Details of the best preserved, indeed the most complete early Homo skull ever found, have taken 8 years since its discovery in 2005 to reach publication (Lordkipanidze, D.  et al. 2013. A complete skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, and the evolutionary biology of early Homo. Science, v. 342, p. 326-331, DOI: 10.1126/science.1238484).

To the surprise of palaeoanthropologists, this specimen of Homo erectus georgicus has some ape-like features, including a protruding upper jaw in a relatively large face that most resembles the oldest African H. habilis, from Ethiopia, dated at 2.3 Ma. With a braincase of 546 cm3, the skull is on the small side of H. habilis and in the range of late australopithecines. Yet, like the much younger Homo floresiensis – dubbed ‘the Hobbit’ – the association with tools, of the most basic Oldowan type,  places it a cut above non-human hominins. The rest of the skeletal fossils show individuals with modern human proportions, albeit somewhat diminutive.

Surprises multiplied when comparative studies of all 5 skulls were complete. They are so different that, if found in widely separated specimens, would be placed in different species by most anatomists. Ruling out the chance association of several human species far from their Africa origins – few would suggest that up to 5 species left Africa at the same time and stuck together – a suggested explanation is that they represent a population of a human lineage in the process of evolving to a new species. The strength of this hypothesis contradicts the other recent view that several human species may have cohabited environments at different times. It also seems to throw into question the adoption of the name H. erectus for later human populations in both Africa and Eurasia: unless, as the authors tentatively suggest, there was genetic continuity and connectivity over large distances between both evolving populations

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