Homo heidelbergensis: the Mauer jaw and a shared ancestor
- Date
- c. 600,000 years ago
- Category
- Science, technology & invention
- Region
- Europe and Africa
- Era
- Prehistory
- Significance
In 1907 a quarry worker near Mauer, southwest of Heidelberg in Germany, unearthed a robust, chinless human lower jaw that became the type specimen of a new species, Homo heidelbergensis, described by Otto Schoetensack in 1908. Radiometric dating places the Mauer mandible at about 609,000 years old.
Homo heidelbergensis is often used as a label for the large-brained, big-bodied archaic humans of the Middle Pleistocene in Africa and Europe (and sometimes Asia) who bridged the gap between Homo erectus and later humans. Many scholars regard this population as the last common ancestor of Neanderthals in Eurasia and modern humans in Africa, with European groups evolving toward the Neanderthal lineage and African groups toward Homo sapiens. Associated with refined Acheulean tools, the controlled use of fire, big-game hunting and the first colonisation of cooler northern climates, Homo heidelbergensis represents a crucial stage in human evolution — though the species concept itself is contested, with some researchers favouring narrower or different classifications.
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Further reading
The wider story
A Little History of Science
Warm, jargon-free tour of discovery from Babylonian stargazers to the genome.
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