Dating the skull from Broken Hill, Zambia, and its position in human evolution

Rainer Grün (), Alistair Pike, Frank McDermott, Stephen Eggins, Graham Mortimer, Maxime Aubert, Lesley Kinsley, Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Michael Rumsey, Christiane Denys, James Brink, Tara Clark and Chris Stringer ()
Additional contact information
Rainer Grün: Griffith University
Alistair Pike: University of Southampton
Frank McDermott: University College Dublin,
Stephen Eggins: The Australian National University
Graham Mortimer: The Australian National University
Maxime Aubert: The Australian National University
Lesley Kinsley: The Australian National University
Renaud Joannes-Boyau: The Australian National University
Michael Rumsey: Natural History Museum
Christiane Denys: Sorbonne Université, EPHE, Université des Antilles
James Brink: National Museum
Tara Clark: Griffith University
Chris Stringer: Natural History Museum

Nature, 2020, vol. 580, issue 7803, 372-375

Abstract: 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 heidelbergensis2–4. However, the original site has since been completely quarried away, and—although the cranium is often estimated to be around 500 thousand years old5–7—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.

Date: 2020
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2165-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:580:y:2020:i:7803:d:10.1038_s41586-020-2165-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2165-4

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().