Archaeologists find 1.8M-year-old Homo erectus skull

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

Archaeologists say they have found a 1.8 million-year-old Homo erectus skull in Georgia, the oldest such skull to be found in Europe. According to David Lortkipanidze, director of the Georgian National Museum, the skull was found August 6 and excavated on August 21 in Dmanisi, about 85 km southwest of Tblisi.

The skull was said to have been found at a site archaeologists have been examining since 1936 along with four other bones and fragments, including a jaw bone found in 1991. "Practically all the remains have been found in one place. This indicates that we have found a place of settlement of primitive people," said Lortkipanidze.[1]

The researchers said their find was more than one million years older than any outside Africa. The skull and other remains have been cited as evidence of Homo erectus's migration into Europe at least 500,000 years earlier than has previously been thought.

Previously fossils of the hominid ancestor have been found in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.

Some of Lortkipanidze's earlier findings that had more slender, small features, including a smaller brain relative to Homo sapiens, contradicted anthropological theories that Homo erectus was large and intelligent even by Homo sapiens standards.

Sources

Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili. "Pre-human skull found in Georgian republic" — nola.com, August 22, 2005

"Dmanisi" — Wikipedia, August 13, 2005

Share this:

The text of this article has been released into the public domain. In the event that this is not legally possible, this article may be used for any purpose, without any condition, unless such conditions are required by law. This applies worldwide. Copyright terms on images, however, may vary, so please check individual image pages prior to duplication.
Please note that this only applies to Wikinews content created prior to September 25, 2005. All content created after that date is released under a Creative Commons license which is mentioned at the bottom of each article. This is currently the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

This page is archived, and is no longer publicly editable.

Articles presented on Wikinews reflect the specific time at which they were written and published, and do not attempt to encompass events or knowledge which occur or become known after their publication.

Got a correction? Add the template {{editprotected}} to the talk page along with your corrections, and it will be brought to the attention of the administrators.

Please note that due to our archival policy, we will not alter or update the content of articles that are archived, but will only accept requests to make grammatical and formatting corrections.

Note that some listed sources or external links may no longer be available online due to age.