Lecture 16 - H. erectus s.s. Flashcards
H. erectus success
the most successful Homo species
lived incredibly long
H. erectus in Java
Discovery
- Eugene Dubois
- the most ancient hominin ever found at the time (1891)
- Trinil, Java, Indonesia
- found femur, calotte, and tooth
- Pithecanthropus erectus = ‘upright ape man’ or ‘Java Man’
mystery of lost fossils
what were the Chinese discoveries?
- site: Zhoukoudian
- discovered in 1920s-30s
- Canadian anthropologist David Black
- named Sihanthropus pekinesis - ‘Peking Man’
mystery of lost fossils
what was found at Zhoukoudian
- uncovered 200 fossils from more than 40 individuals
mystery of lost fossils
what happened to the Zhoukoudian fossils?
- excavation brought to a halt in 1937 by the Japanese invasion of China
- fossils sent to USA to protect them
- BUT never found after shipping
- Weidenrich made casts (interpretative casts)
- excavation resumed in 1949
mystery of lost fossils
who is Franz Weidenrich, what did he propose?
- argued that Zhoukoudian and Java discoveries should be put in a single taxon
- Dubois opposed
- created multiregional hypothesis
mystery of lost fossils
what is the multiregional hypothesis?
African H. erectus gave rise to intermediate archaic Africans which led to modern African humans and the same goes for Asian, European, and Australian species
- debunked by genetic evidence
out of Africa
what did dispersal look like?
- prior to H. erectus, species were confined to Africa
- immediately start to see spread to southwest Asia and southern Europe around the same time
- suggests that there was a rapid spread as soon as they left Africa
H. erectus from Java
H. erectus from Java general info & dispersal
- sites - Sangiran (1.8 - 0.9 Ma), Ngangdong (0.2-0.05 Ma)
- still questions about provenance and dating - current work is revisiting original sites
- land bridge between Java and mainland Asia that could have enabled dispersal
H. erectus from Java
H. erectus vs H. ergaster - same species implications
- early African versions & Asian fossils are the same thing = H. erectus s.l.
- if truly one species, it is the earliest to be as geographically and temporally widespread (2Ma - 40Ka)
H. erectus
H. erectus s.l. general characteristics
- increased body size
- increase brain size
- reduced dentition and more gracile mandible
- low vault, greatest width is low
- continuous orbital torus (esp. in Asian forms)
- sharply angulated occipital region (esp. in Asian forms)
- thicker bones than in modern humans
- more modern behavior?
H. erectus
H. erectus s.s. compared to H. ergaster
- vault is lower
- cranial bones are thicker
- larger brow ridge
- larger face
did meat make us human discussion points
- expensive tissue & cooking hypothesis
- people have long argued that fossil evidence for meat eating takes off at 1.8 Ma = associated with H. erectus
- cut marks in Eastern Africa show some evidence
- sampling bias? can what’s happening at just 2 sites explain the entire behavior of meat-eating evolution
