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Palaeoanthropology

Small-brained and big-mouthed

Nature volume 502, pages 452–453 (2013)Cite this article

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A complete hominin cranium found at the archaeological site of Dmanisi shows remarkably primitive morphology, prompting its discoverers to propose that early forms of the genus Homo evolved as a single, highly variable lineage.

Hominins are species more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees. The oldest hominin fossils that have been found outside Africa are from 1.77-million-year-old strata at Dmanisi in the Georgian Caucasus1. These specimens show closest similarities to early Homo erectus fossils2, but the discovery in 2000 of a large and robust mandible at the site led to the Dmanisi hominins being attributed to a new species, Homo georgicus3, with this mandible as its holotype. But other researchers have considered whether the size and shape differences between Dmanisi mandibles indicate that these fossils represent more than one species4,5. Writing in Science, Lordkipanidze et al.6 now provide the description and comparative analysis of the cranium associated with the large H. georgicus mandible — and use this to infer a taxonomy that breaks with a decades-long consensus on hominin evolution.

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Figure 1: A new cranium from Dmanisi.

a, GURAM BUMBIASHVILI/GEORGIAN NATL MUS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fred Spoor is in the Department of Human Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig 04103, Germany, and University College London, UK.,

    Fred Spoor

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  1. Fred Spoor
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Correspondence to Fred Spoor.

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Spoor, F. Small-brained and big-mouthed. Nature 502, 452–453 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/502452a

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