Abstract
The timing and route of early human dispersals out of the African continent are among the most important issues currently discussed in paleoanthropology. Several questions arise concerning both early and later dispersals: When did migration events happen? From which populations did these dispersing hominins stem? Which routes did they use? One of the likely dispersal corridors passes through Turkey, which is situated between three continents and therefore can be seen as an important bridge between them. Despite its geographic position, paleoanthropological research in Turkey has been limited, and the known fossil human record from this region is small. Although most of the known fossil human remains were found during early investigations, in the last decade new finds have further highlighted the region’s potential for paleoanthropological research. This chapter reviews the human fossil record from Turkey, and presents the results of a preliminary geometric morphometric study of the Kocabaş hominin, the oldest and most important fossil human specimen known from the country.
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Acknowledgments
We thank The Ministry of Culture and Tourism of Turkey and the Pamukkale Hierapolis Archaeological Museum for allowing access to the Kocabaş specimen for the purposes of this study. We are grateful to Prof. Mehmet Cihat Alçiçek for his comments on the geology of the area and sharing with us information about the fossil and the site. The scanning equipment used in our study of the Kocabaş specimen was borrowed from the Tübingen Paleoanthropology Imaging Laboratory (Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Paleoecology, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen). We also thank Amelie Vialet for helpful comments on a previous draft of this manuscript, as well as Mirjana Roksandic and two anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions greatly improved this paper. This work was supported by the ERC Starting Grant project ‘Paleoanthropology at the Gates of Europe’ (PaGE) Nr. 283503.
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Aytek, A.İ., Harvati, K. (2016). The Human Fossil Record from Turkey. In: Harvati, K., Roksandic, M. (eds) Paleoanthropology of the Balkans and Anatolia. Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0874-4_6
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