Ancestors from Heidelberg and Swanscombe?
We still have at least four authentically early human fossils from which European men may have descended. Each has its own interesting story.[10]
The fragment of jaw found under 80 feet of sand at Mauer, Germany, we call Heidelberg man, although he is the least human of the lot. He seems also to be the most ancient, perhaps belonging to the first interglacial period. At least the bones of horses, elephants, bears, and other animals found at the same level in the sand pit derive from the early stages of the Ice Age. Heidelberg man clearly lacks a chin, and his molar teeth are reminiscent in some ways of cattle rather than men or even monkeys, for that matter. This is an important clue, for the same thing, “taurodontism,” occurs much later among some of the Neanderthals.
Heidelberg was not found with or near any stone tools. He seems to belong to that part of the Pleistocene in which the Abbevillian tools were made. Although he shares a few physical traits with Neanderthal man, who lived much later and made excellent tools, some specialists point out that the Heidelberg jaw bears an even closer resemblance to the early man-apes of South Africa, who had no toolmaking tradition.
For the long, cool, and somewhat arid second interglacial period, we have two good prospects, both probably females. One of these is from Swanscombe. In 1936, A. T. Marston found there among the undisturbed Middle Gravels a fragment of fossil skull. Except for its unusual thickness, it was not unlike an equivalent portion in the skull of modern man. Marston’s discovery was all the more exciting since this fragment fitted very well with another, obviously from the same skull, which he had found in place the previous year, only a few paces away. The two pieces, from the left side and back of the skull, provided the earliest undisputed evidence for a very early form of modern man. Twenty years later, in 1955, Mr. J. Wymer recovered a third fragment, from the right side of the same skull. The spots from which the three fragments of the Swanscombe skull were recovered mark a triangle, the sides of which measure 24, 49, and 51 feet. Near the Swanscombe bones and at the same level were found more than two hundred stone flakes as well as four small hand axes of Acheulean type, a stone knife, and fragments of other tools. As we have mentioned, the gravels appear to be an undisturbed deposit. Accordingly, they are now adequately protected and the object of a most intensive and careful excavation. From them may come yet more information about this ancient ancestor.[11]
This is early man, indeed. Swanscombe, from all the evidence now available, is very close physically to modern man, closer than many fossil men from the third interglacial period. And judging from the accompanying stone tools, we may say that Swanscombe was culturally as well as physically human.
Until additional remains of Swanscombe are recovered, we cannot with certainty assign these remains to a precise place among man’s ancestors. There are a few who suspect that the facial bones, should these be recovered, would place Swanscombe closer to Neanderthal than to modern man. However profitless such a conjecture may seem, it is at least suggested by our third early European fossil, the Steinheim skull.
Twenty-three feet beneath the surface in a gravel quarry at Steinheim, Germany, this now famous skull was found. First reported in 1933 by Curator Fritz K. H. Berckheimer, of the nearby Stuttgart Natural History Museum, this skull was well within a layer of gravels which now are believed to be of second interglacial age. Steinheim is now considered more or less a contemporary of Swanscombe, perhaps just slightly less ancient. In the Steinheim skull there is a strong resemblance to the Swanscombe skull and to that of modern man. But most of the right side of the Steinheim face is intact, along with a few molar teeth, and in these there is little likeness to Homo sapiens.
Given the Swanscombe bones alone, probably no anatomist would dream of constructing for it a Neanderthal-like face. But in the Steinheim skull there can be no mistake. Here we find a skull of reasonably modern shape but equipped with enormous bony ridges over the eye sockets, a markedly broad nose, and a somewhat projecting mouth—all suggestive of Neanderthal. In the main, even these features may be somewhat closer to an early type of modern man. It has been asked: Could Steinheim be an ancestor to both Neanderthal and modern man?