Dmanisi: Early Man

[Rusalka]

Here's the Georgian pre-historic find in Dmanisi I had mentioned in another thread. Some articles and links (from various dates) to follow. This news is quite up to date, I read about it only last month although the dig has been going on for quite a while and information had been released from as early as 2002. I believe it's still an on-going project.



From ScienceAlert:
One of the richest archaeological sites ever found is rewriting the human story. Julian Cribb reports.

MEET THE (NEW) ANCESTORS

Looking across a verdant lake valley alive with game, in a land to be known as Georgia at some remote future time, the diminutive, small-brained, ape-faced creature seems hardly destined for planetary conquest.

Yet, from 1.75 million years ago, the slender little pre-human is rewriting the story of who we are, where we came from and how we got here.

Revealing this epic tale is an energetic Georgian palaeontologist, David Lordkipanidze, who has waged a decade-long struggle to uncover, substantiate and protect fresh evidence about our common origins.

Lordkipanidze is leading an international team of scientists in unearthing a trove of ancient hominid remains, stone implements and animal fossils from a site at Dmanisi in central Georgia – the oldest truly human ancestors yet to be found outside Africa. For his remarkable achievements, he has been chosen as a 2004 Laureate of the Rolex Awards for Enterprise.

Since the first find came to light in 1991, Lordkipanidze's discoveries at Dmanisi have set prehistorians in a ferment, and shattered the popular image of a big, tough, smart and well-armed Homo erectus, striding confidently out of Africa about a million years ago to stake a claim to Asia, Europe and the rest.

Instead, says the Georgian, a smaller creature with a lesser brain, a more primitive countenance, perhaps longer arms and shorter legs and a much simpler toolkit seems to have been first to undertake the great enterprise of peopling the world. This prehistoric anti-hero is being tantalisingly revealed, a scrap at a time, in four skulls, four jawbones, 16 isolated teeth and 24 other bones, along with more than 3,000 stone tools, from a site totalling no more than 150 square metres.

When Georgia emerged from a disintegrating USSR into nationhood in 1991, little was known of its early human prehistory. Lordkipanidze and his colleagues havenow thrown the spotlight on it with dramatic effect.

The scene of their endeavours is a rocky, wooded plateau rising between the swift-flowing Mashavera and Pinezaouri rivers. This was the site of the mediaeval city of Dmanisi which lay at an intersection on the ancient Silk Road between Byzantium, Armenia and Persia. In 1983 palaeontologist Dr Abesalom Vekua, excavating among the town’s ruined fortress and houses, had unearthed a fossilised rhino tooth. There followed an extraordinary wealth of animal remains dating from the early Pleistocene, 1.5 to 2 million years ago: elephants, gazelles, rhinos, sabre-toothed cats, giraffes, bears, ostriches, wolves and rodents.

In 1984 the first stone tools made their appearance: cobbles roughly worked to a basic cutting edge – nothing like the elegant hand axes crafted by later Homo erectus – but nonetheless, a blazing signpost to primal human activity.

This was spectacularly confirmed in 1991 when, on the final day of Lordkipanidze's first digging season, German student Antje Justus was carefully excavating the bones of an extinct sabre-tooth cat. In the earth immediately beneath them lay an unmistakably human-like jaw with a full set of teeth.

"It was a shock...incredible. I knew it was something important, but at the time I honestly did not understand how important," Lordkipanidze recalls. The pressing question was: how old was it? Initial tests placed the bone at 1.6 million years – a date that went off like a charge of dynamite in a prehistory profession that revels in acrimonious debate. This was far too early for a human ancestors said some, who challenged both dating and interpretation.

In the following seasons came the electrifying finds of four skulls and three more jaws – an incredible haul for any prehistoric site, let alone so small an excavated area. Lordkipanidze felt these bore a strong resemblance to the slight, small-brained ancestral humans from Africa, Homo habilis and Homo ergaster (living 2.5 to 1.6 million years ago), predecessors of the larger, brainier and more rugged Homo erectus. For a decade scientific argument raged.

In 2000, he, along with Professor Leo Gabunia and other colleagues, published findings on two of the skulls in the journal Science, along with an authoritative verdict from the Berkeley Geochronology Center, in California: the bones were about 1.75 million years old. It was finally clear that the Dmanisi hominids were the earliest-known human ancestors to venture out of Africa and occupy other continents. It transformed Georgia from a palaeoanthropological backwater to a focus of international interest. And it revealed hominids as prodigious long-distance explorers, hunters and adventurers – arguably the earliest appearance of these human traits.

Today, Harvard University Professor of Anthropology Ofer Bar-Yosef attests that Dmanisi is "one of the most important projects [studying] human evolution, if not the most important one".

The hominids of Georgia were small and lithe, barely 1.5m tall but upright and able walkers, says Lordkipanidze. Their crania reveal a brain of between 650 and 780cc, comparable with the early African hominids, but smaller than later erectus and half that of modern humans. They inhabited a volcanic landscape fringed by hills and mantled with forest and savannah. They chose their lookout with a hunter's care – between a lake and a river where game would concentrate and seek water. They worked stone tools and may have carried stones for throwing (manuports).

Of the site's astonishing richness, Lordkipanidze says: "It seems that each year we get a new surprise. It's like a crime story. I adore crime stories. We're the investigators, and each year there are new victims and clues – but no witnesses."

The potential of the Dmanisi site is huge: it extends over 13,000 square metres, of which about one per cent has been excavated. It is also vulnerable – rain, wind and frost are loosening precious fossils and stone tools in the excavated areas; if the objects fall, they lose context and, thus, scientific meaning. Medieval and bronze-age sites nearby have been looted and, while this has not yet occurred at the hominid site, Lordkipanidze fears it is only a matter of time. Furthermore, the local region offers many promising sites yet to be prospected for evidence of early human occupation that the team is planning to explore.

To shield the site from the elements, Lordkipanidze plans to erect a 2,000-squaremetre dome of steel and glass, which would also extend the number of months each year in which fieldwork can continue. The dome will house an on-site laboratory to analyse the finds and an on-site museum for the growing stream of visitors. In Georgia, funds for such a structure are scarce, and the Laureate plans to invest money from his Rolex Award for Enterprise towards this goal.

"We are a young country and this is a great moment to show people that science is not just for scientists, but for everybody. The Rolex Award is very important, not just financially, but because of the recognition it brings of the cultural significance of this region. I believe it will help spark the process of development," he says.

Olga Soffer, professor at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Illinois in the United States, says that the Dmanisi project is “the most important palaeoanthropological research project around today.…It is imperative to build a shelter over Dmanisi, not only to preserve it for research purposes, but because it is a most important part of our global cultural heritage and patrimony.”

By 2007, Lordkipanidze hopes, Dmanisi will take its place on UNESCO's World Heritage List, an important milestone in the epic march of humanity across the Earth.

[Rusalka]

This 1.75-million-year-old skull from the republic of Georgia might have belonged to one of the first humans to leave Africa. And it doesn’t look anything like what scientists thought it would.


This is the face that’s changing a thousand minds. It could be the face of the first human to leave Africa. And it’s not what anyone expected. This 1.75-million-year-old pioneer, found last year beneath the ruins of a medieval town called Dmanisi in the republic of Georgia, had a tiny brain—not nearly the size scientists thought our ancestors needed to migrate into a new land. And its huge canine teeth and thin brow look too apelike for an advanced hominid, the group that includes modern humans and their ancestors. Along with other fossils and tools found at the site, this skull reopens so many questions about our ancestry that one scientist muttered: “They ought to put it back in the ground.”

The Dmanisi team has found parts of as many as six individuals in the same layers of rock. Among them is an enormous jawbone; it belonged to an individual who must have been significantly bigger than the others. It’s possible that there were several species of hominids here, but Dato thinks that’s unlikely—the fossils were found close to each other and different hominid species don’t tend to be found together. If they’re the same species, then the size differences need to be explained some other way. Perhaps the big mandible belonged to an old male, and like gorillas today Dmanisi males were much larger than females. Or perhaps our ancestors were as variable in size as humans are today. Why not? After all, Shaquille O’Neal and Danny DeVito are members of the same species. Is it possible that the scientists who have given new species names to every early Homo find with significant differences have made our family tree more complicated than it really is?


There is an almost one-million-year gap between the Georgian republic site of Dmanisi and any European early-human site, with Spain holding the earliest accepted fossils, dated at 780,000 years old. Yet humans had reached eastern China by 1.1 million years ago. Why did early humans appear to have taken so long to get to western Europe, when it’s the closer exit from Africa than eastern Asia? One theory suggests that climate and geography prevented them from dispersing into Europe and sent them eastward into Asia instead. Or perhaps, early sites like Dmanisi just haven’t been discovered yet. There is much that we still don’t know; the story of human origins is forever unfolding. —Mary Jennings



http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0208/feature1/

[Rusalka]

Dmanisi: Early Man (reconstructions)
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/...ultimedia.html

[Rusalka]

And this is the official website of the project where more detailed information is available:

http://www.dmanisi.org.ge/


The fieldwork was finished in 2002 but usually post-fieldwork takes much longer to conclude than the actual digs.

[Dr. Solar Wolff]

These fossils are really old, Villifrancian. The only fauna I recognize are an archaic bear, a rhino, an animal like a saber-toothed cat. The others must be very old. One of the hominid fossils look a bit like Broken Hill. The jaw does not look as robust to me as Heidelburg (Mauer) but there are more individuals here. This was at least 1.6 million years old and pretty far North.