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December 17, 2005
Homo erectus in Britain?
You may recall the discovery of evidence for 680,000 year old stone tools in Britain. Jørgen Holm at Zinken has an interesting piece on the issue. He is supportive of the dating. He refers to these tool makers as Homo erectus and acknowledges that they may be Homo heidelbergensis saying,
The Nature article merely says 'early man', referring, I suppose, to either Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis. Basically, H. heidelbergensis is still very enigmatic, but may be a transitional stage between H. erectus and modern humans or a separate species.
Chris Stringer, who was part of the research team, speculated publicly, but not in the Nature article, that the tools makers were "early form of Homo heidelbergensis or Homo antecessor."
However, as Holm correctly points out, there is ongoing discussion about the relationship between H. erectus and H. heidelbergensis. They may well turn out to be two sides of the same coin. The same problem applies to H. antecessor another proposed maker of the Pakefield tools. These three may be different species and they may only be minor variations on the same theme. In any case, until skeletal remains are found any identification is speculative. With skeletal remains there may be some confirming evidence one way or the other. However, the first weight of such evidence would be to inform the larger question of species, only then can the question of "Who were these tool makers" be addressed.
A technical note: The actual tools were not found. What was found was the debris created by flint knapping.
Posted by Duane Smith at December 17, 2005 10:16 AM | Read more on Paleoanthropology |
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Comments
So that's where I saw Stringer's comments... knew I had seen it somewhere and totally lost it and didn't really have time to track it down. Incidentally, you can get the paper on H. antecessor here
Posted by: afarensis at December 18, 2005 11:24 AM
Since you have been following the story, I thought I would mention this
Posted by: afarensis at December 18, 2005 8:26 PM
Sorry, comments are closed for this post.
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