The Mauer mandible
A jaw from a German sand pit becomes the type specimen for a whole species.
- When
- Known to
- ± 40 thousand years
- Era
- Middle Pleistocene, Quaternary
In 1907 a quarry worker near Heidelberg found a massive human lower jaw with no chin but small, human-proportioned teeth, in sands dated to about 609,000 years ago. Otto Schoetensack named it Homo heidelbergensis the following year. It remains the type specimen, which is part of why the species is so difficult to define: a single mandible carries very little of the information needed to decide what else belongs with it.