The Family Gallery

So one day, it randomly hit me that there have been SO many humans alive so far. And looking at fossils and ancient objects used by the people of the past illustrates how LONG our history has been. But we have been here for only about 2 million years. Given that that in itself is but a teeny-tiny portion of our young universe’s history, I just feel so spell-bound. And in that blip in time, so many things have happened.

For quite some time now, we Homo Sapiens are the only existing species of humans. But if you look at it from an outside perspective, nearly every animal we know has a lot of sub-categories within its type. For instance, there are more than a hundred breeds of dog, or about forty different types of crow, BUT today there exists one type of humans, us Homo Sapiens.

Dead skulls are always interesting to look at, and they can really tell us a lot about our ancient grandparents who lived millions of years ago. So I’ll be showing you some pretty amazing archaeological findings, and off we start!

1. Homo Erectus from Kenya

Skull of the Homo Erectus (Upright man) found in Koobi Fora, Kenya; ~1.55 million years old
Picture and information credit: http://library.si.edu ; https://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/fossils/knm-er-42700

This is the cranium of a young adult who is one of the smallest brain sizes to have been found in the Homo Erectus and is similar to some of the brain fossils of the Homo Habilis. This was discovered along with Habilis skulls in Kenya, which meant that the Habilis and Erectus co-existed, rather the Habilis preceding the Erectus as thought before.

2. An Elderly Neanderthal

Thilo Parg / Wikimedia Commons; License: CC BY-SA 4.0 ; No changes were made from the original

La Ferrassie 1, a male Neanderthal skeleton, is estimated to have lived around 45-70,000 years ago. He holds the title of having the most complete Neanderthal skull and second-largest Hominid skull ever discovered. His heavily worn out teeth also possibly indicate that he used them to hold objects. Approximated to have been around 45 years old, La Ferrassie 1 was likely considered a senior citizen as most other Neanderthals of his age were.

3. An Archaic Mixture – The Red Deer Cave People

https://doi.org/10.1038/srep12408 – Darren Curnoe, Xueping Ji, Paul S. C. Taçon, and Ge Yaozheng

– Fossils of the skulls of the Red Deer Cave People. They were named so because of the evidence of deer having been cooked in their caves. The remains of these people exhibit characteristics that may have been caused due to mating between the Denisovans and Early Modern Humans. Another theory suggests that these people became genetically isolated over time in south-west China after having settled there 100,000 years ago; but no DNA has yet been extracted from the bones, and research so far shows that the Red Deer Cave People were a result of a mixture with modern humans.

4. Umm… Denisovans?

Thilo Parg / Wikimedia Commons ; License: Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 4.0 International” or “License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Shown above is a molar from a Denisovan.

Denisovans were distant relatives of the Neanderthals, and they lived in parts of Asia. A study showed that the Ayta Magbukon ethnic group from the Philippines shares the highest proportion of Denisovan genes among modern day humans.
So by ~10,000 years ago they were all gone. Their disappearance could have been a mass extinction but there doesn’t seem to have been any obvious catastrophe during that period. But, the timing of this extinction could have also been caused by the spread of a new group: the Homo Sapiens:) .

5. ‘The Hobbit’

– A Homo Floresiensis skull at the Naturmuseum Senckenberg in Germany.

About 100,000 to 50,000 years ago, the Indonesian “Hobbits” lived, and have been named so because of their height (about 3 feet and 6 inches) and have only been found so far on the Island of Flores in Indonesia. They had brains with sizes about a third of ours and yet they were able to make stone tools. Their small stature may have been a result of island dwarfism which is the result of isolation on an island for a long time with not much predators.

They survived, until a new species came onto the island and once again, and these were the Homo Sapiens.😐

6. Possibly the Last Common Ancestor of Sapiens and Neanderthals – Homo Antecessor

• Left – reconstructed skull of the Boy of Gran Dolina (a child who dwelled in the Spanish Gran Dolina cave)
• Right – An adult mandible

So before you see the final member of our Family’s Gallery in this post, I would like to introduce you to the Homo Antecessor – a species that could have possibly been the last common ancestor of us and the Neanderthals (although it is uncertain whether it was the H. Antecessor or H. Heidelbergensis who was our last common ancestor). These people belong to the first (known) group of humans from Europe, and hence have been named Antecessor, which means ‘pioneer’ or ‘explorer’ in Latin.
They went extinct about 800,000 years ago, but not because of Sapiens. Many of the specimens found had been cannibalized probably due to severe famines or as a traditional custom.

7. Cheddar Man

Geni, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

So Cheddar Man, a lactose intolerant Sapien, lived around 10,000 years ago and is Britain’s oldest complete human skeleton. He probably had green or blue/hazel eyes, dark brown/black hair and a skin tone you may be surprised to see.

Unfortunately I’m not sure if I can post an image of him here, so I’m linking the National History Museum’s article where there’s a photograph of the reconstructed model of him – https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/cheddar-man-mesolithic-britain-blue-eyed-boy.html.

He lived during the Mesolithic age and was about five-and-a-half feet tall, and died in his twenties. As you can see in the picture, there is a fracture in his skull. This could mean that he died some sort of a violent death or it could have been caused something else after he was buried. His physical features resemble those of the Western European Population of that time period, who now still form about 10% of the ancestry of today’s British population (only those who have lived there for several generations, not those who come from other countries).

And with that, the Gallery ends. There are, of course several more exhibits, but they will have to wait for future posts. And so for now, I hope you enjoyed this one!!

Also, thank you for bearing with my lessening number of posts. But I hope you enjoyed this one, and if you would like me to explore any topic for future posts, you can post it in the comments!! Thanks a lot for reading!

Additional links & Credits:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/19k_W7YMNBDAUz4JlnjCNKGrJGC3dGVWhW2CnwSjIrQk/edit?usp=sharing