Everything about Skull 1470 totally explained
Homo rudolfensis is a
fossil hominin species discovered by
Bernard Ngeneo, a member of a team led by anthropologist
Richard Leakey and zoologist
Meave Leakey in 1972, at
Koobi Fora on the east side of Lake Rudolf (now
Lake Turkana) in
Kenya. The scientific name
Homo rudolfensis was proposed in 1986 by
V. P. Alexeev for the specimen
Skull 1470 (KNM ER 1470). Skull 1470 has an estimated age of 1.9 million years.
Originally thought to be a member of the species
Homo habilis, the fossil was the center of much debate concerning its species. Assigned initially to
Homo habilis, the skull was at first incorrectly dated at nearly three million years old. This estimate, however, caused much confusion: the date would have made the skull older than any known
australopithecine, from which
Homo habilis is thought to have descended.
The differences in this skull, when compared to others of the
Homo habilis species, are too pronounced, leading to the presumption of a
Homo rudolfensis species, contemporary with
Homo habilis. It isn't certain if
H. rudolfensis was ancestral to the later species in
Homo, or if
H. habilis was, or if some third species yet to be discovered was.
As in the case of
H. habilis, there's large amount of controversy about the classification of
H. rudolfensis into the
Homo genus. Although no reliably associated postcranial remains have been discovered for
H. rudolfensis, it's thought that — like
H. habilis —
H. rudolfensis lacked many of the features unique to later
hominins (that is, creatures that include humans and their ancestors), such as slim hips for walking long distances, a sophisticated sweating system, narrow birth canal, legs longer than arms, noticeable whites in the eyes, smaller hairs resulting in naked appearance and exposed skins, etc. Many scientists think
H. rudolfensis to be more ape-like despite its large brain and bipedal locomotion.
In March 2007, a team led by Timothy Bromage, an anthropologist at New York University, reconstructed the skull of KNM-ER 1470. The new construction looks very ape-like and the cranial capacity based on the new construction is downsized from 752 cubic centimeters to about 526 cm³. Bromage said his team’s reconstruction includes biological principles not known at the time of the skull’s discovery, which state that a mammal’s eyes, ears and mouth must be in precise relationships relative to one another.
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