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Fossil Records of Early Modern Humans

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Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology

Introduction

Efforts to understand the origin of Homo sapiens were bedeviled for decades by the inclusion within our species of a host of late Middle or Late Pleistocene “archaic” fossils possessing cranial morphologies that deviated, sometimes enormously, from those we see among humans living today. In recent years, however, it has begun to dawn on some paleoanthropologists that modern Homo sapiens is actually very distinctive, and highly derived in its morphology, and that it makes most biological sense to include within this species only fossils that bear significant osteodental hallmarks of the living form (Tattersall & Schwartz 2009; Schwartz & Tattersall 2010). This morphological requirement makes the search for the origins of Homo sapiens more straightforward, although not necessarily easier.

Definition

Without doubt, the single most significant cranial apomorphy of the living species Homo sapiensis the retraction of its small facial skeleton beneath the front of a more or...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History, New York, NY, USA

    Ian Tattersall

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  1. Ian Tattersall
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Correspondence to Ian Tattersall .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Archaeology, Flinders University, Adelaide, SA, Australia

    Claire Smith

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Tattersall, I. (2014). Fossil Records of Early Modern Humans. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1489

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_1489

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