• DOI:10.1038/s41559-019-0860-z
• Corpus ID: 102353734

Evidence for increased hominid diversity in the Early to Middle Pleistocene of Indonesia

@article{Zanolli2019EvidenceFI,
  title={Evidence for increased hominid diversity in the Early to Middle Pleistocene of Indonesia},
  author={Cl{\'e}ment Zanolli and Ottmar Kullmer and Jay Kelley and A M Bacon and Fabrice Demeter and Jean Dumoncel and Luca Fiorenza and Frederick E. Grine and Jean‐Jacques Hublin and Anh Tuan Nguyen and Thi Mai Huong Nguyen and Lei Pan and Burkhard Schillinger and Friedemann Schrenk and Matthew M. Skinner and Xueping Ji and Roberto Macchiarelli},
  journal={Nature Ecology \& Evolution},
  year={2019},
  volume={3},
  pages={755-764}
}

• C. Zanolli, O. Kullmer, +14 authors R. Macchiarelli
• Published 8 April 2019
• Environmental Science, Geography
• Nature Ecology & Evolution

Since the first discovery of Pithecanthropus (Homo) erectus by E. Dubois at Trinil in 1891, over 200 hominid dentognathic remains have been collected from the Early to Middle Pleistocene deposits of Java, Indonesia, forming the largest palaeoanthropological collection in South East Asia. Most of these fossils are currently attributed to H. erectus. However, because of the substantial morphological and metric variation in the Indonesian assemblage, some robust specimens, such as the partial mandibles Sangiran 5 and Sangiran 6a, were formerly variably allocated to other taxa (Meganthropus palaeojavanicus, Pithecanthropus dubius, Pongo sp.). To resolve the taxonomic uncertainty surrounding these and other contentious Indonesian hominid specimens, we used occlusal fingerprint analysis (OFA) to reconstruct their chewing kinematics; we also used various morphometric approaches based on microtomography to examine the internal dental structures. Our results confirm the presence of Meganthropus as a Pleistocene Indonesian hominid distinct from Pongo, Gigantopithecus and Homo, and further reveal that Dubois’s H. erectus paratype molars from 1891 are not hominin (human lineage), but instead are more likely to belong to Meganthropus.Morphometric analyses of hominid teeth from Early to Middle Pleistocene Java reveal that Meganthropus was a Pleistocene Indonesian hominid distinct from Pongo, Gigantopithecus and Homo, and that molars previously assigned to Homo erectus are more likely to belong to Meganthropus.