Mauer 1 Mandible Replica

Description

Mauer 1 Mandible Replica or Homo heidelbergensis. The Mauer 1 Mandible Replica was discovered in a gravel pit near Heidelberg, Germany in 1907. Its lack of a chin, ample retro-molar space and smaller tooth size earned the distinction of it being considered the type specimen of Homo heidelbergensis. The jaw is dated to be approximately 500,000 years old.

Mauer 1 Mandible or Homo heidelbergensis (also H. sapiens heidelbergensis) is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human which existed during the Middle Pleistocene. It was subsumed as a subspecies of H. erectus in 1950 as H. e. heidelbergensis, but towards the end of the century, it was more widely classified as its own species.

It is debated whether or not to constrain H. heidelbergensis to only Europe or to also include African and Asian specimens, and this is further confounded by the type specimen (Mauer 1) Mauer 1 Mandible being a jawbone, because jawbones feature few diagnostic traits and are generally missing among Middle Pleistocene specimens.

Thus, it is debated if some of these specimens could be split off into their own species or a subspecies of H. erectus.

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Primates
Suborder: Haplorhini
Infraorder: Simiiformes
Family: Hominidae
Subfamily: Homininae
Genus: Homo
Species: †H. heidelbergensis
Binomial name: †Homo heidelbergensis
Schoetensack, 1908