Ancient World
Herto Man
Herto Man is a set of human remains discovered in 1997 from the Upper Herto member of the Bouri Formation in the Afar Triangle, Ethiopia. The remains have been dated as between 154,000 and 160,000 years old. The discovery of Herto Man was especially significant at the time, falling within a long gap in the fossil record between 300,000 and 100,000 years ago and representing the oldest-dated Homo sapiens remains then described. In the original description paper, these 12 (at minimum) individuals were described as falling just outside the umbrella of "anatomically modern human". Thus, Herto Man was classified into a new subspecies as "Homo sapiens idaltu" (Afar: Idaltu "elder"). It supposedly represented a transitional morph between the more archaic H. (s.?) rhodesiensis and H. s. sapiens (that is, a stage in a chronospecies). Subsequent researchers have rejected this classification. The validity of such subspecies is difficult to justify because of the vague definitions of "species" and "subspecies", especially when discussing a chronospecies, as the exact end-morphology and start-morphology of the ancestor and descendant species are inherently unresolvable. Herto Man produced many stone tools which can fit into the vaguely defined "Transitional Acheulean", the long-lasting cultural tradition with both characteristically Acheulean (made by archaic humans) and Middle Stone Age (made by modern humans) tools. They seem to have been butchering mainly hippo, but also bovines, in a lakeside environment. The three most complete skulls (one a 6-to-7-year-old child) bear manmade cut marks and other alterations, which could be evidence of mortuary practices like excarnation.
Also on this shelf
Callander.
Alanya Archaeological Museum.
See also
Uncatalogued shelfText from Wikipedia; plate via Wikimedia Commons. Text CC BY-SA 4.0; plate freely licensed (see Commons). Source record. Images and catalogue data are reproduced from open-access collections.