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Re: 30,000 year old Homo erectus
Dan Barnes (dbarnes@liv.ac.uk)
Wed, 18 Dec 1996 13:37:22 GMT
In article
<Pine.SUN.3.95L.961215171505.15011B-100000@sawasdee.cc.columbia.e
du>, rlh2@columbia.edu says...
> Having worked on these specimens when they were in Frankfurt with Von
>Koenigswald, I find it amazing that they can be so readily classified as
>Homo erectus. As I recall, both Santa Luca and myself were far from
>certain what the taxonomic affinities of the Solo specimens were. My study
>of their endocasts left me with the impression of continuities with
>earlier Homo erectus populations, but I couldn't simply say that they were
>anything more than primitive Homo sapiens retaining certain Homo erectus
>cranial characteristics. I also have visited some of the Solo sites when I
>had the pleasure of working with Teuku Jabob, and I would be really
>skeptical tabout the associations being claimed between bovids and the
>older Solo crania and getting accurate dates for the latter. I suspect
>some grandstanding here, and I don't see why previous dating, i.e., about
>100,00-130,000 needs to be abandoned at this point. It's very difficult to
>remember the exact sites of each of the Solo fragments.
The archaic Homo sapiens designation is the one I'd always assumed but the
Science article quotes Rightmire (when examining them this March) as saying
they are definetly H.e. and after his examination of the earliest archaic H.s. for
his paper this year I would assume he can spot the difference.
However, I'm not an anatomist but I am a U-series dater and I cannot fault the
dates (other than the simple 'they must be wrong') or the associations. Other
dates are problematic esp. the gamma U-series that have never been
published. I think time (and 14C dates) will tell.
Dan
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