Introduction
The species name Homo heidelbergensis was applied by Otto Schoetensack to a mandible recovered in 1907 at Mauer, near Heidelberg in Germany. Lying in fluvial sands deposited by the Neckar River, the human fossil was accompanied by animal bones indicating an early Middle Pleistocene age. In describing the well-preserved jaw (Fig. 1), Schoetensack (1908) commented on the lack of any bony chin but noted that the teeth are similar in form to those of recent humans. Many years later, F.C. Howell confirmed the presence of primitive features in the specimen while arguing that H. heidelbergensis could be distinguished from Asian and African representatives of H. erectus. Howell (1960) left open the relationship of the fossil to later Europeans, but H. heidelbergensisis now often regarded as ancestral to Neanderthals. It is generally accepted that the jaw from Mauer can be grouped with the mandibles and partial cranium from Arago Cave in France and the cranium from Petralona in...
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Rightmire, G.P. (2020). Homo heidelbergensis . In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_690
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