john hawks weblog

paleoanthropology, genetics and evolution

Indonesia

  • Asian Homo erectus

    Mon, 2011-11-07 23:59 -- John Hawks
    Synopsis: 
    Examining a sample of crania from the Early and Middle Pleistocene of Asia and Indonesia

    Homo erectus entered Asia as early as 1.8 million years ago. One of the earliest specimens of the species is the Modjokerto skull, from Java. The spread of this species across the tropical Old World was a major event in our evolution. After Homo erectus reached East and Southeast Asia, it had a long history — up to 200,000 years ago or even more recently.

    This station has several representatives of this Asian dispersal of early humans.

    • Trinil 2, Java, 1.2 million years old.
    • Sangiran 2, Java, 1.0 million years old.
    • Zhoukoudian L2, China, 700,000 years old.
    • Zhoukoudian L1, China, 700,000 years old.
    • Ngandong 10, Java, 200,000 years old.
    • Ngandong 8, Java, 200,000 years old.
    • Nganding 4, Java, 200,000 years old.

    What to do: Overall, these fossils are very similar. However, they come from a wide range of times. Make an attempt to seriate the fossils by cranial size. List the results of your seriation. Does it correlate with time?

    Try seriating the skulls according to the form of their frontal bone or supraorbital torus. This feature differs between fossil specimens from Java and China. Does your seriation indicate this difference in geography?

    Study terms: 
    Zhoukoudian
    Sangiran
    Ngandong
    Trinil
    seriation
    Tags: 
    Anthropology 105
    laboratory
    Homo erectus
    Asia
    China
    Indonesia
    Sangiran
    Zhoukoudian

  • Shell instead of stone

    Mon, 2009-04-06 10:53 -- John Hawks

    Discovery News has a short article about Australian archaeologist Katherine Szabo's analyses of tools made of shell instead of stone in Late Pleistocene contexts:

    In published research to date, Szabo reports having excavated shell tools dating back 32,000 years from a cave site in eastern Indonesia, and comparing them with stone tools from the same cave.

    "It transpired that the shell tools were in fact much more complex to produce than the stone tools," she said.

    The stone tools were randomly chipped, but the shell tools had been carefully chosen and shaped.

    In one case, a "cats eye" or operculum shell was flaked systematically with five blows, each one slightly overlapping with the last in a clockwise direction.

    I want to mention along with this story that one of our own Ph.D.'s, Kildo Choi, published a paper in 2007, "Shell tool use by early members of Homo erectus in Sangiran, central Java, Indonesia: cut mark evidence". That paper documented cutmarks on early Pleistocene faunal elements that were made by clamshell, not stone. So the use of shell as a raw material probably goes back hundreds of thousands of years in the area.

    Tags: 
    archaeology
    Acheulean
    Southeast Asia
    Late Pleistocene
    Indonesia
Subscribe to Indonesia

Neandertals

For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.

Denisova

From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.

Acceleration

The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.

Malapa

Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.