Synonyms
Definition
Most ancient species of Homo found in East Africa between 2.3 and 1.6 million years ago.
Introduction
Based on anatomical similarities between the African apes and humans, Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley forecast that the oldest fossil evidence for human ancestors would be found in Africa (Huxley 1863). In 1924 Raymond Dart recognized a child’s skull from South Africa as a potential ancestral human and named it Australopithecus africanus (“southern African ape”). Sometimes referred to as “ape-men,” these early hominins were found in abundance at a number of sites in South Africa and were assigned to several distinct species.
After Mary Leakey’s discovery of a 1.8 million-year-old cranium at Olduvai Gorge in 1959, field research began to focus more extensively on East Africa and the Great Rift Valley. The cranium, Olduvai Hominid 5 (OH 5), popularly known as “Nutcracker Man,” due to its massive molars, was ultimately placed in its own species, Austral...
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References
Huxley, T. H. (1863). Evidence as to man’s place in nature. London: Williams and Norgate.
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Leakey, L., Tobias, P. V., & Napier, J. R. (1964). A new species of the genus Homo from Olduvai Gorge. Nature, 202, 7–9.
Spoor, F., Gunz, P., Neubauer, S., Stelzer, S., Scott, N., Kwekason, A., & Dean, M. C. (2015). Reconstructed Homo habilis type OH 7 suggests deep-rooted species diversity in early Homo. Nature, 519, 83–86.
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Wood, B. (2014). Fifty years after Homo habilis. Nature, 508, 31–33.
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Johanson, D. (2017). Homo habilis . In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3433-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3433-1
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