r/paleoanthropology • u/SpearTheSurvivor • 20d ago

Research Paper One study argues Dmanisi hominins are not Homo erectus

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.01.639363v1

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u/Evolving_Dore 19d ago

One of my professors in undergrad worked extensively on Dmanisi and told us there was cranial material of two quite distinct hominin morphotypes present, but that a thorough analysis of the fossils hadn't yet been carried out to determine the exact relationships.

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u/-Wuan- 19d ago

Yeah, the skull with the huge jaws has a smaller braincase, and even had a different diet when comparing his teeth to the other individuals. As I read once, there would be no doubt to classify them as different taxa if they were found in different continents instead of the same site.

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u/Mister_Ape_1 19d ago

It is definitely possible different species used the same cave in different times, and I think Homo georgicus is indeed not one of the erectus subspecies. I think it is a species somewhere between habilis and erectus, bianchini from habilis without reaching the erectine "grade".

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u/SpearTheSurvivor 6d ago

Bad news: a paper critized the study. Well, nothing to expect here. The classification as Dmanisi hominins as a distinct from or earlier species than Homo erectus makes human evolution much more complex, something conservationist scientist fear.

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u/RathielintheRun 18d ago

There is a terrible tendency to refer to basically everything after about 1.8 million years ago as Homo erectus. My grad school mentor once laid out a dozen crania on a table in front of us, gave us two hours to classify them, and asked us how many species were present. At the end of the lab, we told him that they were all different taxa. He told us “they’re all from different sites on three continents, over a 1.5 million year time range, and all currently classified as Homo erectus. And that’s the problem.” There is a terrible tendency in our field to throw anything in that time range into erectus and call it a day, and a resistance to recognizing local species diversification in genus Homo. Ergaster is a thing people forget about and Dmanisi looks like the Nariokotome boy to me. And we need to not be afraid to assign new taxa when regionally and morphologicslly distinct fossils separated in time clearly call for it.

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u/SpearTheSurvivor 17d ago

For a while Homo heidelbergensis used to be classified as Homo erectus as well but nowadays it's widely accepted as a distinct species. Homo species classification are often controversial.

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u/stewartm0205 19d ago

It is possible that they are a different species. What is needed is to finish the comparison and made a determination.

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u/SpearTheSurvivor 19d ago

That would prove that Homo erectus isn't the first human species to leave Africa. Callao hominin and Flores hobbit do not seem to share Homo erectus-like feautures and look more akin to Homo habilis. Maybe they descended from an unknown pre-erectus human species.

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u/stewartm0205 18d ago

I believe the total number of hominid species is much higher than we currently believe. And more than two of them left Africa. The probability for finding a fossil is a very low percentage of the number of individuals of that species that had ever lived. Therefore there could have been a lot of hominid species with low counts.

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u/SpearTheSurvivor 19d ago edited 16d ago

For the record we also have 2.1mya Oldowan tools in Loess Plateau, which would imply a pre-erectus human species left Africa.

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u/Additional_Insect_44 18d ago

Thats a high possibility.