Ever since I saw the image below, of how the Pintubi 1 skull differs from the classic H sap. skull, I’ve been on the lookout for someone whose skull resembles Pintubi 1. I’ve finally found one.

Some background. Skulls in human palaeontology tend to be described as “robust” and “gracile”. With the assumption that the evolution of H. sap from ancestors has been a progression from robust to gracile characteristics. The discovery of a more gracile skull at any epoch is usually heralded with an announcement that “we’ve found an ancestor of H. sap”. And in the main that is true, but not necessarily always.

The Cow Swamp skulls in Australia are of the robust type, and were originally taken as evidence that a different species of human arrived in Australia before the Australian aboriginals. The Pintubi 1 skull threw a lot of doubt on that because here was a robust skull from a relatively modern human.

But there were still problems. Nobody knows for sure how old the Pintubi 1 skull actually is, it is tentatively assigned to 200 years old. The skull has vanished, lost, so can’t be examined any more. If I read the literature correctly, the Pintubi tribe went extinct in about 1955, so we can’t compare their skulls with the Pintubi 1 skull.

Ever since then, I’ve been looking for a modern human who has a skull similar in four respects to the Pintubi 1 skull: the receding chin, the protruding upper lip, the heavy brow ridges and the strongly sloping forehead. All four can only be seen in profile view, from face on view the shape differences vanish. Google search and image search is useless, so I’ve had to rely on TV. Occasionally people pop up on TV with one of the characteristics, like Julia Roberts. Much more rarely two, like David Jason and people in some African documentaries.

I’ve finally found someone on TV with a similar skull to the Pintubi 1 skull. On TV last night, a rerun of Martin Clunes “Islands of Australia”. One of the Tiwi Islanders has a skull with all four robust characteristics. One, not all.

Yippee. Human biodiversity has not been lost – yet. :-)

Pintubi 1 skull, left, vs typical H. sap, right

Peking man
Discovered in 1927, Peking Man is a specimen of the now-extinct hominid race. A member of the Homo erectus species, he walked the earth between 770,000 and 230,000 years ago. His flat features are especially particular, while his cranial capacity is similar to that of modern humans.

PermeateFree said:

Peking man
Discovered in 1927, Peking Man is a specimen of the now-extinct hominid race. A member of the Homo erectus species, he walked the earth between 770,000 and 230,000 years ago. His flat features are especially particular, while his cranial capacity is similar to that of modern humans.

Who is Martin Chunes?

dv said:

PermeateFree said:

Peking man
Discovered in 1927, Peking Man is a specimen of the now-extinct hominid race. A member of the Homo erectus species, he walked the earth between 770,000 and 230,000 years ago. His flat features are especially particular, while his cranial capacity is similar to that of modern humans.

Who is Martin Chunes?

clunes, doc martin.

dv said:

PermeateFree said:

Peking man
Discovered in 1927, Peking Man is a specimen of the now-extinct hominid race. A member of the Homo erectus species, he walked the earth between 770,000 and 230,000 years ago. His flat features are especially particular, while his cranial capacity is similar to that of modern humans.

Who is Martin Chunes?

A spelling error.

Martin Clunes…

ChrispenEvan said:

dv said:

PermeateFree said:

Peking man
Discovered in 1927, Peking Man is a specimen of the now-extinct hominid race. A member of the Homo erectus species, he walked the earth between 770,000 and 230,000 years ago. His flat features are especially particular, while his cranial capacity is similar to that of modern humans.

Who is Martin Chunes?

clunes, doc martin.

Oh okay, probably just a typo.

So how is Martin Clunes relevant to this? Is it a men behaviing badly thing?

Michael V said:

dv said:

PermeateFree said:

Peking man
Discovered in 1927, Peking Man is a specimen of the now-extinct hominid race. A member of the Homo erectus species, he walked the earth between 770,000 and 230,000 years ago. His flat features are especially particular, while his cranial capacity is similar to that of modern humans.

Who is Martin Chunes?

A spelling error.

Martin Clunes…

Thanks for correcting my spelling error. Clunes.

He was speaking to this Tiwi islander in his “Islands of Australia” Part 2.

Thanks also for pointing out the similarity between Pintubi 1 and Pekin Man. The Pekin skull is not the same, it’s more robust – heavier brow ridges and more sloping forehead for starters.

Between the two we have Heidelberg Man and Neanderthal (and supposedly Denisovan, but Denisovan man didn’t have a skull).

Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthal recreations from left to right. The Neanderthal skull looks remarkably like Pintubi 1, but genetically they’re quite different.

mollwollfumble said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

Who is Martin Chunes?

A spelling error.

Martin Clunes…

Thanks for correcting my spelling error. Clunes.

He was speaking to this Tiwi islander in his “Islands of Australia” Part 2.

Thanks also for pointing out the similarity between Pintubi 1 and Pekin Man. The Pekin skull is not the same, it’s more robust – heavier brow ridges and more sloping forehead for starters.

Between the two we have Heidelberg Man and Neanderthal (and supposedly Denisovan, but Denisovan man didn’t have a skull).

Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthal recreations from left to right. The Neanderthal skull looks remarkably like Pintubi 1, but genetically they’re quite different.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/632484/

I want to repeat here that no Australian aboriginal person has yet been shown to be genetically related to Neanderthals. It’s the western Europeans, particularly the English, who are most closely genetically related to the Neanderthals. It’s the similarity of phenotype that I find interesting.

So far as I know, no-one has yet directly compared the Pintubi 1 skull (or similar robust skulls from Cow Swamp and elsewhere) with the Neanderthal skull.

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

Michael V said:

A spelling error.

Martin Clunes…

Thanks for correcting my spelling error. Clunes.

He was speaking to this Tiwi islander in his “Islands of Australia” Part 2.

Thanks also for pointing out the similarity between Pintubi 1 and Pekin Man. The Pekin skull is not the same, it’s more robust – heavier brow ridges and more sloping forehead for starters.

Between the two we have Heidelberg Man and Neanderthal (and supposedly Denisovan, but Denisovan man didn’t have a skull).

Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthal recreations from left to right. The Neanderthal skull looks remarkably like Pintubi 1, but genetically they’re quite different.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/632484/

I want to repeat here that no Australian aboriginal person has yet been shown to be genetically related to Neanderthals. It’s the western Europeans, particularly the English, who are most closely genetically related to the Neanderthals. It’s the similarity of phenotype that I find interesting.

So far as I know, no-one has yet directly compared the Pintubi 1 skull (or similar robust skulls from Cow Swamp and elsewhere) with the Neanderthal skull.

Don’t think anyone is trying to pin an ancestry down to a species, but in recent years there have been several new discoveries and from this region, Homo luzonensis and Homo floresiensis, which indicates that human evolution is far more complicated than previously realised. I do wonder if the Cow Swamp skull fossil was discovered in mainland China whether they would be as accommodating that it was a member of Homo sapiens, especially when the similarity of fossil skulls are necessarily to determine if they are of the same species.

As there were other hominins wandering around this region for hundreds of thousands of years, who is to say that some did not find their way to Australia. There are supposed middens and fireplaces discovered near Warrnambool that are dated to 120 thousand years, although no tools have been discovered thereby placing human influence in doubt, but they cannot be disregarded and have very strong support in scientific circles. Personally I think there is an enormous amount to be uncovered in Australia and should be assumed to be from direct Aboriginal ancestry.

PermeateFree said:

mollwollfumble said:

mollwollfumble said:

Thanks for correcting my spelling error. Clunes.

He was speaking to this Tiwi islander in his “Islands of Australia” Part 2.

Thanks also for pointing out the similarity between Pintubi 1 and Pekin Man. The Pekin skull is not the same, it’s more robust – heavier brow ridges and more sloping forehead for starters.

Between the two we have Heidelberg Man and Neanderthal (and supposedly Denisovan, but Denisovan man didn’t have a skull).

Erectus, Heidelbergensis, Neanderthal recreations from left to right. The Neanderthal skull looks remarkably like Pintubi 1, but genetically they’re quite different.

https://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/632484/

I want to repeat here that no Australian aboriginal person has yet been shown to be genetically related to Neanderthals. It’s the western Europeans, particularly the English, who are most closely genetically related to the Neanderthals. It’s the similarity of phenotype that I find interesting.

So far as I know, no-one has yet directly compared the Pintubi 1 skull (or similar robust skulls from Cow Swamp and elsewhere) with the Neanderthal skull.

Don’t think anyone is trying to pin an ancestry down to a species, but in recent years there have been several new discoveries and from this region, Homo luzonensis and Homo floresiensis, which indicates that human evolution is far more complicated than previously realised. I do wonder if the Cow Swamp skull fossil was discovered in mainland China whether they would be as accommodating that it was a member of Homo sapiens, especially when the similarity of fossil skulls are necessarily to determine if they are of the same species.

As there were other hominins wandering around this region for hundreds of thousands of years, who is to say that some did not find their way to Australia. There are supposed middens and fireplaces discovered near Warrnambool that are dated to 120 thousand years, although no tools have been discovered thereby placing human influence in doubt, but they cannot be disregarded and have very strong support in scientific circles. Personally I think there is an enormous amount to be uncovered in Australia and should be assumed to be from direct Aboriginal ancestry.

and should be assumed to be from direct Aboriginal ancestry.

should read:

and should NOT be assumed to be from direct Aboriginal ancestry.

Marcia Ponce de Léon, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Zürich in Switzerland who was not involved in the new study, agrees that “it is reasonable to call the new fossil Homo erectus.” A 2013 study by Ponce de Léon and colleagues described a 1.8-million-year-old hominin skull from Dmanisi, Georgia, identifying it as likely belonging to one of the earliest Homo erectus to leave Africa.

As the species migrated across continents, it continued to adapt to new environments. “Every population of every species continues to evolve wherever it goes,” Ponce de Léon says in an email. Tracing the spread and adaptation of Homo erectus halfway across the globe could help scientists learn more about the way our wandering ancestor survived in the different environments it encountered.

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/04/fossil-skulls-rewrite-stories-ancient-human-ancestors-homo-erectus-paranthropus-robustus/

> Homo luzonensis

Um, what? (Checks web).
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/04/new-species-ancient-human-discovered-luzon-philippines-homo-luzonensis/ How did I miss that?

> The small-bodied hominin, named Homo luzonensis, lived on the island of Luzon at least 50,000 to 67,000 years ago. The hominin—identified from a total of seven teeth and six small bones.

Seven teeth and 6 small bones isn’t much, unless there’s a genetic analysis.

“As luck would have it, excavations uncovered two more toe bones along with seven teeth, two finger bones, and part of a femur on return trips to Callao Cave in 2011 and 2015. In all, the remains represent at least three individuals.”

“The small fossils’ curves and grooves reveal an unexpected mix of both ancient and more advanced traits. The teeth’s small sizes and relatively simple shapes, for instance, point to a more “modern” individual, but one upper premolar has three roots—a trait found in fewer than 3 percent of modern humans. And one foot bone resembles those of the ancient australopithecines”

“South Africa’s Homo naledi—discovered by a team including National Geographic grantee Lee Berger—also has features that look both ancient and modern. She takes the two discoveries as a sign that “mosaic” evolution was more common among hominins than once thought …. the mix of dental features somewhat resembles that seen in 15,000-year-old hominin remains from Dushan in southern China, which she and her colleagues recently described. Along with H. luzonensis, the discoveries join recent finds hinting that by 12,000 years ago, as the Pleistocene epoch drew to a close, hominins in Asia had a startling amount of diversity.”

Long live human biodiversity.