英国自然历史博物馆Chris Stringer、澳大利亚格里菲斯大学Rainer Grün等研究人员对来自赞比亚布罗肯希尔的人类头骨进行了断代和进化定位。相关论文于2020年4月1日在线发表于《自然》杂志。
Title: Dating the skull from Broken Hill, Zambia, and its position in human evolution
Author: Rainer Grn, Alistair Pike, Frank McDermott, Stephen Eggins, Graham Mortimer, Maxime Aubert, Lesley Kinsley, Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Michael Rumsey, Christiane Denys, James Brink, Tara Clark, Chris Stringer
Issue&Volume: 2020-04-01
Abstract: The cranium from Broken Hill (Kabwe) was recovered from cave deposits in 1921, during metal ore mining in what is now Zambia1. It is one of the best-preserved skulls of a fossil hominin, and was initially designated as the type specimen of Homo rhodesiensis, but recently it has often been included in the taxon Homo heidelbergensis2,3,4. However, the original site has since been completely quarried away, and—although the cranium is often estimated to be around 500 thousand years old5,6,7—its unsystematic recovery impedes its accurate dating and placement in human evolution. Here we carried out analyses directly on the skull and found a best age estimate of 299 ± 25 thousand years (mean ± 2σ). The result suggests that later Middle Pleistocene Africa contained multiple contemporaneous hominin lineages (that is, Homo sapiens8,9, H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis and Homo naledi10,11), similar to Eurasia, where Homo neanderthalensis, the Denisovans, Homo floresiensis, Homo luzonensis and perhaps also Homo heidelbergensis and Homo erectus12 were found contemporaneously. The age estimate also raises further questions about the mode of evolution of H. sapiens in Africa and whether H. heidelbergensis/H. rhodesiensis was a direct ancestor of our species13,14.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2165-4
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2165-4
Nature:《自然》,创刊于1869年。隶属于施普林格·自然出版集团,最新IF:69.504
官方网址:http://www.nature.com/
投稿链接:http://www.nature.com/authors/submit_manuscript.html
本期文章:《自然》:Online/在线发表