Heidelberg Man

Heidelberg man

[′hīd·əl·bərg ‚man]

(paleontology)

An early type of European fossil man known from an isolated lower jaw; considered a variant of Homo erectus or an early stock of Neanderthal man.

McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific & Technical Terms, 6E, Copyright © 2003 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Heidelberg Man

 

one of the forms of fossil man. It is represented by a lower jaw discovered in 1907 by the German anthropologist O. Schoetensack at a depth of 24 m in the Elsenz River valley near the city of Heidelberg in Germany. (The bones of fossil animals were discovered at the same time: Etruscan rhinoceros, prehistoric elephant, bison, prehistoric horse, and lion.) It has been dated as early Pleistocene (approximately 400,000 years B.C.). The jaw is remarkable for its combination of primitive features (massiveness, considerable breadth of the ascending ramus, and complete absence of a chin) and teeth similar to those of modern man. The same site also yielded a large number of flint fragments, some of which, in the opinion of some archaeologists, show signs of having been man-made and are therefore considered to be implements of Heidelberg man. Most researchers compare Heidelberg man to Pithecanthropus and Sinanthropus.

REFERENCES

Karlov, N. N. “Otkrytie orudii truda geidel’bergskogo cheloveka.” Priroda, 1958, no. 8.
Iskopaemye gominidy i proiskhozhdenie cheloveka. Moscow, 1966.
Roginskii, la. la., and M. G. Levin. Antropologiia, 2nd ed. Moscow, 1963.

V. P. IAKIMOV

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.