Middle Pleistocene
Ad Hominin

Homo heidelbergensis and the muddle in the middle

10/10/09 19:45 Filed in: Palaeoanthropology
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Michael Balter reports for Science on a recent conference held in Gibraltar entitled Human Evolution 150 Years After Darwin [1]. Gibraltar holds a special place in palaeoanthropologists' hearts. Not only is it the place where the first Neandertal were discovered in 1848, it is also seems to have been among the last refugia of this species, prior to their disappearance some 30,000 years ago. Charles Darwin got to see the original Gibraltar specimen in 1864, which perhaps influenced him to comment on the "well developed and capacious" braincase of Neandertals in The Descent of Man [2].

At the conference, much attention was focused on the Middle Pleistocene "muddle in the middle" [3], particularly the role of Homo heidelbergensis in hominin evolution. While H. heidelbergensis possesses both archaic and derived traits intermediate between H. erectus and later members of the Homo genus, it lacks uniquely derived traits or autapomorphies, which are a prerequisite for defining a species.

H. heidelbergensis has traits that have been interpreted as nascent Neandertal autapomorphies, leading some researchers to propose that there was a continuous evolution of Neandertals [4-6]. This accretion model would make H. heidelbergensis a chronospecies on the continuum of the Neandertal lineage, a view championed by Jean-Jacques Hublin. The accretion model proposes that Neandertals evolved by anagenesis, i.e. non-branching evolutionary change. Read More...

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