PA L E OA N T H R O P O LO G Y

CREDITS: M. S. PONCE DE LEN AND C. P. E. ZOLLIKOFER/UNIVERSITY OF ZURICH

Stunning Skull Gives a Fresh

Portrait of Early Humans
It was the ultimate birthday gift. On his 42nd skeletal bones from at least ve individuals
birthday, 5 August 2005, paleoanthropolo- from Dmanisi, a site that preserves the oldgist David Lordkipanidze was presented est human fossils found outside of Africa.
with the most complete early Homo skull These early humans used crude stone tools,
ever found, freshly uncovered at his site of probably for butchering animals, and lived
Dmanisi, Georgia. As paleontologists gently near a river, a busy watering hole, says geobrushed dirt off its face, they saw strange, archaeologist Reid Ferring of the University
primitive features, unexpected in even an of North Texas, Denton. Ferring used argon
early member of our genus: a protruding, isotopes to date the site to 1.77 million to
apelike upper jaw, and a tiny braincase. One 1.85 million years ago, showing that Homo
scientist joked that you should put it back had expanded into Asia not long after
in the ground, Lordkipanidze recalls.
the genus appeared in Africa.
Instead, Lordkipanidze and an internaAt that time about 18% of the sites
tional team spent 8 years studying the fossil, animal bones belonged to carnivores,
which they describe on page 326. Dating back including fierce saber-toothed cats
to about 1.8 million years ago, the spectacu- and an extinct giant cheetah. Conlar skull includes delicate parts of the face, frontations with these beasts would
rare in other nds, making it the worlds rst have been commonand dangercompletely preserved adult hominid skull ous. All five individuals were found I t a l y
of such antiquity, they write. Combined with in underground dens where carnivores
skulls found earlier at Dmanisi, it also sug- had probably dragged their carcasses.
gests that ancient individuals from the same Ferring thinks the skeletons were all
time and place were very different from each deposited within a couple centuries, at
other but still members of one speciesan most, after which the dens collapsed.
idea that has implications for the perplexThis carnivores cache has proing patchwork of Homo fossils
duced new fossils season after
found in Africa.
season. The massive lower jaw of
The skull is undoubtedly
the new skull was found back in
one of the most important ever sciencemag.org
2000, and Lordkipanidze and othSee slideshow for
discovered, says paleoanthroers had expected to unearth a huge
images of the new
pologist Ian Tattersall of the skull (http://scim.ag/
cranium to go with it. Instead they
American Museum of Natural slide_6156).
found the cranium of an older man
History in New York City. An
with arthritis in his jaw, worn front
iconic fossil, proclaims Tim White, a paleo- teeth probably used as a gripping tooland
anthropologist at the University of California, a small brain of only 546 cubic centimeBerkeley. It will stand out for a long time.
ters. Thats within range of an earlier human
Over the past 20 years, Lordkipanidze ancestor, Australopithecus, whose brains
and his colleagues have unearthed skulls and averaged 450 cm 3, compared with 1350

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Putting their heads together. Researchers think that

all ve of these skulls from Dmanisi belong in one
species. Skull 5 is on the right.

cm3 for modern humans, notes co-author

Christoph Zollikofer, a neurobiologist at the
University of Zurich in Switzerland. This
conrms that our ancestors didnt need big
brains to get out of Africa.
When the researchers attached the lower
jaw to the new cranium, designated Skull 5,
the lower face bones jutted out more like an
Australopithecus. This is, in essence, a very
primitive face, says co-author Yoel Rak of
Tel Aviv University in Israel.
Yet its clearly Homo, many researchers agree. The skulls vertically oriented
upper face and the shape of the braincase

Ukraine

Russia
Caspian
Sea

Romania

Georgia
B l a c k S e a Dmaninsi

Bulgaria

Azerbaijan

Armenia
Iran

Tu r ke y

Syria

Iraq

Mediterranean Sea

distinguish it from Australopithecus. Skeletal bones found with the skulls, including
Skull 5, show that although these humans
were short in stature, they had modern body
proportions and could walk long distances
(Science, 21 September 2007, p. 1664).
But what species of Homo is it? Some
fossils previously discovered at Dmanisi
seemed to have links to H. erectus. But when
the big lower jaw was found in 2000, some
researchers suggested it belonged to a new
species they called Homo georgicus.
With the discovery of the new, fth skull,

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the researchers had to confront head-on the

variation among all ve. Age and sex probably account for much of it: The skulls
are thought to have belonged to an elderly
toothless male, two mature males, a young
female, and an adolescent of unknown sex.
This broad sample from one place and a
short span of time is what makes Dmanisi an
exceptional site, White says. By analyzing
the skull shapes with 3D computer-based
methods, the researchers found that the
range of variation in the group at Dmanisi
was no greater than within living humans
or chimps. The team concluded that all ve
skulls belong to a single, variable species
Putting all ve skulls into a single species still left the problem of what to call
it. The team squabbled at rst. Looking at
particular traits, they found that the upper
jaw of Skull 5 most closely resembles the
oldest fossil proposed as Homoa 2.3million-year-old jaw from Ethiopia tentatively assigned to H. habilis. But Skull 5 also
shares key features with H. erectus, such as
thick brow ridges. In the end, the team settled on the cumbersome moniker of Homo
erectus ergaster georgicus, which recog-

Lowbrow. This artists reconstruction shows the new

skulls small brain and protruding jaw.

nizes the skull as an earlier Georgian form

of H. erectus. But they all prefer to call their
nds early Homo.
The skull shape analysis and classical
trait analysis, done by Zollikofer and his Zurich colleague Marcia Ponce de Len, also
showed that the skulls were as variable as
African fossils traditionally classied in three
different speciesH. erectus, H. habilis, and
H. rudolfensis. If the Dmanisi fossils had been
found in separate places in Africa, they could
have been called separate species, Ponce de

Len says. Lumping them all into H. erectus

suggests that the early Homo fossils in Africa
may also belong to that same, single lineage.
That controversial idea is setting off a
small bomb in the field, says co-author
Philip Rightmire of Harvard University.
Tattersall thinks Dmanisi could include more
than one species, and that Skull 5 represents a
new species. Paleoanthropologist Ron Clarke
of the University of the Witwatersrand in
Johannesburg, South Africa, counters that
Skull 5 looks to me like Homo habilis. And
while paleontologist Fred Spoor of the Max
Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, thinks it sensible to call Skull 5 H. erectus, he balks at
the notion that fossils in Africa all belong in
H. erectus, too, arguing that the teams analyses cant delineate diagnostic differences in
skull shape.
Whatever Skull 5s specic identity, Spoor
agrees that it is a fantastic, terric specimen. Says White: No matter what you call
it, this skull and the others from Dmanisi are
some of the best evidence we have about how,
where, when, and why humans evolved.
ANN GIBBONS

PRIZES

Molecule and Market Studies Capture Nobel Laurels

A Prize for Molecular Modeling

and today is a British, U.S., and Israeli cit- by springlike bonds. Because this approach
Youve seen the modelsmolecules rep- izen. And Arieh Warshel of the University was mathematically tractable for large numresented as balls connected by sticks, often of Southern California in Los Angeles was bers of atoms, it enabled researchers to simpared down to a few lines on paper. Useful as born in 1940 in Kibbutz Sde-Nahum, Israel, ulate proteins and other large molecules. In
they are to chemists, they leave out something and still holds Israeli citizenship.
1969, Levitt and Warshel, then both at the
essential: motion, the intricate dance of elecMore than 40 years ago, the three pio- Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot,
trons and atomic nuclei breaking and fusing neered new tools for fusing two disparate Israel, designed a ball-and-spring combonds as they undergo reactions. That dance world views among chemists working to puter model that could track how proteins
is the heart of chemistry. Last weeks Nobel simulate molecules. One of them, grounded and other large biomolecules oscillate and
Prize in chemistry was awarded to three U.S.- in classical Newtonian physics, treated mole- twist. But it couldnt calculate the changes
based scientists for developing computer cules as collections of atomic balls connected in energy involved when chemicals react and
models that reveal how proform new molecules.
MICHAEL LEVITT
ARIEH WARSHEL
MARTIN KARPLUS
teins and other compounds
Meanwhile, at Harperform it.
vard, Karplus was deeply
All three of this years
enmeshed in the second
chemistry laureates are natapproach to simulation,
uralized U.S. citizens. Marcalled quantum chemtin Karplus of Harvard Uniistry. It was far better at
versity and the University
simulating the motion of
of Strasbourg in France was
the electrons and atomic
born in 1930 in Vienna and
nuclei involved in reacmoved to the United States
tions. But it was so comjust before the outbreak of
putationally demanding
World War II. Michael Levthat it was useful only in
itt of Stanford Universisolving the behavior of
tys School of Medicine in
small molecules.
Palo Alto, California, was
Trying to bring the
NOBEL PRIZE 201
2013
born in Pretoria in 1947,
quantum and classical

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CREDITS: (TOP) JAY MATTERNES; (BOTTOM LEFT TO RIGHT) STEPHANIE MITCHELL/HARVARD STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER; LINDA A. CICERO/STANFORD NEWS SERVICE; USC PHOTO/MIRA ZIMET; THE NOBEL FOUNDATION

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