The dating of Lantian man and his significance for analyzing trends in human evolution

Abstract

The Lantian fossil hominid cranium from Southern Shensi Province, China, provides the earliest record of Homo erectus in northern east Asia, and is morphologically the most primitive specimen in the entire world. Importantly, the Kungwangling Lantian cranium (calvarium plus face), with associated stone tools in good geologic and paleontological context, is demonstrably both earlier and more primitive than the Choukoutien I remains. Faunal and palynological evidence support a mid‐Mosbachium equivalent age (some 700,000 years). These facts are not recognized in the original Chinese reports. The Chenchiawo Lantian mandible, like the Choukoutien I remains, is attributable to the Holstein‐equivalent in China (some 300,000 years ago), and therefore should no longer be temporally associated with the Kungwangling Lantian cranium. However, that the mandible may be morphologically associated with either calls attention to the relative independence of the mandible in human evolution. A comparative study of some modern Mongoloid populations in which very large mandibles may or may not be associated with a scaphoid keel or sagittal elevation depending upon the size and shape of the cranium demonstrates the relative autonomy of the mandible. Continuing selection pressure for a masticatory complex with large jaws provides another point of continuity between East Asian fossil and modern Mongoloid hunting populations such as Eskimos and Aleuts. A number of morphological features of the cranium, especially vault thickness, cranial capacity and reinforcement system, conform to expectation and confirm a general trend of reduction in vault thickness and reinforcement system with increase in cranial capacity over time within the single human species.

Bridging the old and new worlds

“…Mongoloid physical characteristics are conspicuous on all known fossil Chinese materials, from Lantian to Upper Cave (Aigner and Laughlin 1973). There is no reason to assume that this remarkable correlation of aspects of technological behavior and skeletal morphology is fortuitous.…”

“…However, north China does not appear as the core area for the Holocene socioeconomic transformation of Japan and Korea to food production; nor is it key in the transformation of the steppes to pastoralism; nor is it the core area for the east Asian Neolithic (as is claimed by scholars who force parallels to near eastern developmental models [Chang 1968] ). The increasingly convincing evidence from southeast Asia and south China finds those regions the areas of developing gardening systems-as at Spirit Cave in Thailand and Hsien-jen tung in southcentral China (Aigner 1969;1973). The considerable time depth for gardening, estimated as terminal Pleistocene, and the early mid-Holocene dates for rice cultivation, favor a south-to-north developmental trend in China itself.…”

Introduction: The Early Paleolithic Tradition of East Asia

“…Aigner and Laughlin (1973) suggested that the associated fauna is comparable to the fauna of the Djetis Bed of Java, which could be about 1.5 million years old. A quartz pebble with flake scars has also been reported from the Nihowan Formation of North China near Peking (Gai and Wei 1974).…”

New dating of the Homo erectus cranium from Lantian (Gongwangling), China

“…The first was by Aigner and Laughlin (1973), who suggested on faunal and palynological grounds that it was early Middle Pleistocene in age, or ca. 700e780 ka (thousands of years ago).…”