page_title: Mauer 1
section_title: Relation to modern humans
hierarchical_section_title: Mauer 1 / Relation to modern humans
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: L'Homme de Mauer avec son bâton et son cadavre de sanglier. Buste en plâtre peint. Par Louis Mascré et Aimé Rutot. 1909-1914. Institut royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique, Bruxelles. Photographié à l'exposition "Néandertal, l'expo" au musée de l'Homme à Paris en avril 2018.
context_page_description: The Mauer 1 mandible is the oldest-known specimen of the genus Homo in Germany. It was found in 1907 in a sand quarry in the community Mauer, around 10 km south-east of Heidelberg. The Mauer 1 mandible is the type specimen of the species Homo heidelbergensis. Some European researchers have classified the find as Homo erectus heidelbergensis, regarding it as a subspecies of Homo erectus. In 2010 the mandible's age was for the first time exactly determined to be 609,000 ± 40,000 years. Previously, specialist literature had referred to an age of either 600,000 or 500,000 years on the basis of less accurate dating methods.
context_section_description: The Mauer mandible is the type specimen of the species Homo heidelbergensis. "The anatomy is clearly more primitive than that of Neanderthal, but the harmoniously rounded dental arch and the complete row of teeth...already typically human." Based on these circumstances—the chronological delineation from the more recent Neanderthal on the one hand, and from older fossils, denoted as Homo erectus on the other—today's researchers consider it justifiable to declare Mauer 1 as an independent chronospecies. According to Chris Stringer, Homo heidelbergensis ranks separable between earlier Homo erectus and the more recent Neanderthal and Homo sapiens; it is from this point of view the last common ancestor of Neanderthal and anatomically modern man.
  Other researchers hold the contrary view that the evolutionary development in Africa and Europe was a gradual process from Homo erectus via the representative of the findings assigned to Homo heidelbergensis towards Neanderthal. Any form of segregation is considered arbitrary, which is why these researchers forgo the name Homo heidelbergensis altogether. They classify the Mauer 1 man as a late local (European) form of Homo erectus.
  However, there is agreement among all paleo-anthropologists that the lower jaw of Mauer does not belong to the immediate ancestral line of modern man. He is regarded rather as a descendant of an early migration to Europe and Asia (depending on the terminology—of Homo erectus or Homo heidelbergensis), whose oldest fossils outside of Africa are about 1.8 million years old. The last descendant of this first migration to Europe was Neanderthal, who became extinct about 30,000 years ago. Members of the species Homo sapiens arrived in Europe only in a second migratory wave of the genus Homo at around 40,000 to 30,000 years ago, whose descendants include modern man.
caption: Bronze bust of the Mauer 1 individual by Louis Mascré and Aimé Rutot, 1909–1914 (Institut royal des Sciences naturelles de Belgique, Brussels)
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