THE HEIDELBERG JAW
In
addition to Dubois's Java man discoveries, further evidence relating to human
evolution turned up in the form of the Heidelberg
jaw. On October 21,1907, Daniel Hartmann, a workman at
a sand pit at Mauer, near Heidelberg, Germany,
discovered a large jawbone at the bottom of the excavation, at a depth of 82
feet. The workmen were on the lookout for bones, and many other nonhuman
fossils had already been found there and turned over to the geology department
at the near 848j92i by University
of Heidelberg. The
workman then brought the jaw over to J. Riisch, the
owner of the pit, who sent a message to Dr. Otto Schoetensack:
"For twenty long years you have sought some trace of early man in my
pit... yesterday we found it. A lower jaw belonging to early man has been found
on the floor of the pit, in a very good state of preservation."
Professor
Schoetensack designated the creature Homo heidelbergensis, dating it using the accompanying fossils
to the Gunz-Mindel interglacial period. In 1972, David
Pilbeam said the Heidelberg jaw "appears to date from the
Mindel glaciation, and its
age is somewhere between 250,000 and 450,000 years."
The
German anthropologist Johannes Ranke, an opponent of
evolution, wrote in the 1920s that the Heidelberg
jaw belonged to a representative of Homo sapiens rather than an apelike
predecessor. Even today, the Heidelberg
jaw remains somewhat of a morphological mystery. The thickness of the mandible
and the apparent lack of a chin are features common in Homo erectus. But
mandibles of some modern Australian aboriginals are also massive compared to
jaws of modern Europeans and have chins that are less well developed.
According
to Frank E. Poirier (1977), the teeth in the Heidelberg
jaw are closer in size to those of modern Homo sapiens than those of Asian Homo
erectus (Java man and Beijing
man). T. W. Phenice of Michigan State
University wrote in 1972
that "the teeth are remarkably like those of modern man in almost every
respect, including size and cusp patterns." Modern opinion thus confirms Ranke, who wrote in 1922: "The teeth are typically
human."
Another
European fossil generally attributed to Homo erectus is the Vertesszollos
occipital fragment, from a Middle Pleistocene site in Hungary. The morphology of the Vertesszollos occipital is even more puzzling than that of
the Heidelberg
jaw. David Pilbeam wrote in 1972: "The occipital
bone does not resemble that of H. erectus, or even archaic man, but instead
that of earliest modern man. Such forms are dated elsewhere as no older than
100,000 years." Pilbeam believed the Vertesszollos occipital to be approximately the same age as
the Heidelberg
jaw, between 250,000 and 450,000 years old. If the Vertesszollos
occipital is modern m form, it helps confirm the genuineness of anatomically
modern human skeletal remains of similar age found in England at Ipswich
and Galley Hill (Chapter 7).
Returning
to the Heidelberg
jaw, we note that the circumstances of discovery were less than perfect. If an
anatomically modern human jaw had been found by a workman in the same sand pit,
it would have been subjected to merciless criticism and judged recent. After
all, no scientists were present at the moment of discovery. But the Heidelberg jaw, because it
fits, however imperfectly, within the bounds of evolutionary expectations, has
been granted a dispensation.
