A hominid tibia from Middle Pleistocene sediments at Boxgrove, UK

Abstract

Fossil hominids from the earlier Middle Pleistocene of Europe are very rare and the Mauer mandible is generally accepted as the most ancient, with an estimated age of 500 kyr. We report here on the discovery of a human tibia, in association with stone tools, from calcareous silts at the Lower Palaeolithic site of Boxgrove, West Sussex, UK (Fig. 1). The silt units are correlated by mammalian biostratigraphy to an, as yet unnamed, major temperate stage or interglacial that immediately pre-dates the Anglian cold stage. Accordingly, the temperate sediments are equated with oxygen isotope stage 13 (ref. 6) and are therefore roughly coeval with the Mauer mandible. The massive tibia is the oldest hominid fragment from the British Isles and provides the first information about the manufacturers of the early Acheulian industries of Europe. It is assigned to Homo cf. heidelbergensis.

Late Middle Pleistocene deposits at Norton Farm on the West Sussex coastal plain, southern England

“…Fowler (1932) recognised that at least two, altitudinally (and, by implication, chronologically) discrete beaches were present in the area. An upper series of sands and gravels at heights above 30 m (100 ft) OD (Ordnance Datum) were identified on the Upper Coastal Plain that were comparable with the sequences reported by Prestwich from Waterbeach and, more recently, those discovered at Amey's Eartham Pit, Boxgrove (Roberts, 1986(Roberts, , 1990Roberts et al, 1994;Roberts and Parfitt, 1999). These often have been referred to collectively as the Goodwood-Slindon or '100 foot' Raised Beach (Bates et al, 1997).…”

“…Conventionally a Hoxnian age was ascribed to the highest 30 m raised beach (Shephard-Thorn & Kellaway, 1978), whereas the lower beach was correlated with the Ipswichian Stage (West and Sparks, 1960;Hodgson, 1964). The recent excavations at Amey's Eartham Pit, Boxgrove, however, have suggested an age late within the Cromerian Complex for the raised beach that occurs between 30 m and 43 m OD (Roberts, 1986(Roberts, , 1990Roberts et al, 1994; but see Bowen and Sykes, 1994;Bates, 1996).…”

Postcranial morphology of the middle Pleistocene humans from Sima de los Huesos, Spain

“…Although middle Pleistocene populations have been described as exceptionally robust (13), phylogenetic hypotheses are based mainly on the more abundant cranial sample (14,15). The recent analysis of 17 crania from Sima de los Huesos (SH) points to a mosaic pattern of evolution in the cranium, with facial modification being the first step in the evolution of the Neandertal clade (16).…”

Molar tooth fragment BL5-0: the oldest human remain found in the Plio-Pleistocene of Orce (Granada province, Spain)

“…Although well-known remains uncovered at Boxgrove in England (Roberts et al, 1994;Stringer et al, 1998) and Atapuerca in northern Spain (Carbonell et al, 1995) show that Homo was established in early Middle Pleistocene Europe, there are much older human remains and palaeolithic artifacts from Orce in southern Spain that testify to human presence in Europe as early as the Plio-Pleistocene boundary. Identification of the Olduvai magneto-subchron at site 7 in the Barranco de Oree (BO-7) (Agust~ et al, 1997) scarcely 150 m from site 5 in the Barranco Le6n (BL-5) strongly supports attributing a similar antiquity to the latter and its assemblage, which includes part of a human tooth crown and root (hominid BL5-0), palaeolithic artifacts, and faunal remains.…”