Maba Man
Maba 1 (also: Maba - man ;马坝 人, Mǎbàrén, English Maba Man / Ma Pa Man) is the name for a mittelpaläolithisches fossil, which in June 1958 in a karst cave of Shizi Shan ( "Lion Mountain"; geodata: 24 ° 40 ' 27.3 '' N, 113 ° 34' 49.8 '' E ) near the village of Maba ( Mabacun ) discovered in Shaoguan, Guangdong province, China, and the genus Homo was attributed.
It is in several pieces broken, incomplete preserved skull roof with forehead and nose area, whose age could be determined yet imprecise. On the basis of animal fossils of the same Fund layer of skull was initially dated to the middle to young Pleistocene. A later dating yielded an age of 130,000 years, but there is no guarantee that these dating the find layer is concerned: The skull had been found by farmers in the degradation of fertilizer, which is why the Fund layer can only be approximately reconstructed. Another, also not sufficiently secured dating suggested an age of almost 240,000 years.
The edentulous skull shows traces of feeding; are missing about 60 percent of the facial bones and about a quarter of the parietal bone. He was initially described as the Neanderthal resembling BY Chinese expert he was also classified as archaic Homo sapiens. If the dating is correct at least the late Middle Pleistocene, but this association is contrary to the now well-known, genetic analyzes to the propagation of man, according to which the Fund is to be assigned to Homo erectus.
In 2011 it was estimated that the skull belonged to a at the time of death about 50 years old person. At the same time it has been demonstrated that it has a - has injury to the bone, which must have been caused by a sharp blow with a blunt object - at least partly healed. This is demonstrated by a bulge on the right side of the skull a crescent-shaped, eight millimeters long, 308 square millimeters wide and 1.5 millimeters deep pressure gauge and at the same point on the skull inside. Signs of inflammation in the former wound area were not found, but rather evidence of newly formed bone tissue after a fracture. The cause of the injury could not be clarified.
Francis Clark Howell described the fossil of Maba (formerly Mapa ) with the type - epithet " mapaensis Kurth ". The taxonomist Colin Groves mentioned, the fossil was introduced by Gerhard Heberer and Gottfried Kurth as "Homo erectus mapaensis Kurth (1965 ) ". Colin Groves 1989, however, opted for the (now increasing knowledge contradictory ) Renamed " Homo sapiens mapaensis Kurth, 1965".
The original name Homo erectus mapaensis for the Fund earned today, thanks to the decrypted mtDNA of " mitochondrial Eve" and other genetic findings, again the preference; However, it is in this name to any generally accepted name for a subspecies.
The fossil is kept under the archive number PA 84 in the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.