Java Man

© Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018

Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology 10.1007/978-3-319-51726-1_712-2

Java Man Russell L. Ciochon1 and O. Frank Huffman2 (1)

Department of Anthropology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

(2)

Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Russell L. Ciochon (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected] O. Frank Huffman Email: [email protected]

Without Abstract Introduction “Java Man” is the informal name given to Pleistocene Homo erectus inhabitants of Java. The fossil discoveries on the island include the first for this extinct species, which is now known to have been widely distributed across the temperate and tropical zones of the Old World (see “Homo erectus”). Today, more than 100 skeletal specimens have been attributed to this species from localities in Central and East Java (Fig. 1; Indriati 2004). No other confirmed specimen of Homo erectus is known from elsewhere in Southeast Asia; however stone tools indicate the presence of early hominins on other islands in Southeast Asia suggesting a wider distribution of Homo erectus (see “Insular Southeast Asia in the Lower Paleolithic”).

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Fig. 1 The Java Man ( Homo erectus) fossil localities described in the text: Ngandong (Ng), Mojokerto (Mo), Sangiran Dome (Sg), and Trinil (Tr); Song Terus cave (St) has Paleolithic artifacts but no Homo erectus fossils. (After Huffman et al. 2012. © Frank Huffman, Univ. of Texas)

It is unclear how Homo erectus communicated: whether they “spoke” in any manner or used gestural communication. Nor do we know how meaningful a twenty-first-century person would find the facial expressions of Java Man. We also have not resolved how Homo erectus social groups were organized, how they divided labor among group individuals, or how exactly they subsisted. On the other hand, the physical attributes of Java Man are reasonably well established. The average Homo erectus stood about 1.7 m (5 feet, 6 inches) tall and had a lanky torso with long, well-muscled limbs and nimble hands. Java Man’s brain was about three-quarters of the size of a modern human’s brain (1000 cm 3 versus 1350 cm 3, respectively). Homo erectus individuals had flattened foreheads with prominent brow ridges (Fig. 2). The rear part of the skull (occipital bone) was curved sharply inward toward its base and had a massive ridge (transverse torus) where strong neck muscles attached. The lower jaw was nearly chinless. The face was massive, giving the head more of a forward projection (prognathism) than Homo sapiens. Java Man’s teeth, on the whole, were only slightly larger than those of modern humans, and their incisors were “shovel-shaped” on the tongue side. Despite this humanlike appearance, Java Man would have stood out in a crowd of our contemporaries. b

Fig. 2 Sangiran 17, the most complete cranium of Java Man (Homo erectus). © Russell L. Ciochon, Univ. of Iowa

Definition “Java Man” refers to representatives of Homo erectus that inhabited Java, Indonesia, during the Pleistocene. In the early 1890s, the Trinil site produced the holotype fossils of Homo erectus (the specimens that constitute the prime reference material used in defining Homo erectus taxonomically).

Key Issues/Current Debates/Future Directions/Examples In the following paragraphs, we describe the best-known Java Man sites of eastern Java (Fig. 1) and use them to highlight the current scientific issues concerning Homo erectus.

Trinil The Trinil discovery was the result of the only deliberate search for a fossil ape-human “missing link” in the nineteenth century. Eugène Dubois, a Dutch doctor who was strongly influenced on the subject of evolution by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, hypothesized that fossils of the ape-human lineage could be found in Southeast Asia (see Eugène Dubois). Dedicated to testing his hypothesis, Dubois joined the Dutch Army as a surgeon stationed in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia; Shipman 2001). In 1888, he began scouring limestone caves and outcrops of volcanic-rich sedimentary rocks known to have produced mammalian remains (de Vos 2010). Within 2 years, in October 1891, while digging in vertebrate-fossil-bearing sandstone exposed along the Solo River at Trinil (Tr on Fig. 1), his field crew discovered a large, fully fossilized, apec

like skullcap (Fig. 3). The following year, the field workers unearthed a humanlike adult thighbone (femur) about 12 m away from where the skullcap had been found and in the same meter-thick bonebed. Dubois asserted that the two specimens were from the same individual (although, surprisingly, debate continues on if the femur is the same species as the skullcap, Ruff et al. 2015; see also Joordens et al. 2014). Based on the two fossils, Dubois defined a new species, Pithecanthropus erectus (meaning “upright ape-man”) − the very kind of creature he went to the East Indies to find. In the 1940s, Pithecanthropus erectus was subsumed into the human lineage as Homo erectus, after anatomical comparisons with other known hominin fossils made it clear that the Java finds were more human- than ape-like.

Fig. 3 Trinil I, the first cranium (skullcap) of Java Man discovered by Eugene Dubois. © Russell L. Ciochon, Univ. of Iowa

Excavation of the Trinil discovery bed (sometimes referred to as the Hauptknochenschicht or Trinil HK) ultimately produced thousands of strongly fossilized bone fragments of animals that had lived alongside Homo erectus in the local Pleistocene paleoenvironment. Most of the fossils represent extinct forms of cattle, water buffalo, deer, Stegodon (an elephant-like proboscidean), pig, rhinoceros, and tiger (de Vos 2010). Also present were denizens of large lowland rivers and estuaries, such as crocodiles, turtles, and catfish (Joordens et al. 2009). The Trinil bonebed is often attributed to the late early Pleistocene (circa 900,000 years ago) on the basis of the correlation of its fauna with similar species at the Sangiran Dome (see below). Despite having contained multiple Homo erectus fossils and thousands of other large fossils, the Trinil discovery bed produced no stone tools. However, fossil freshwater mussel shells from Trinil show evidence of shellfish consumption, tool use, and even geometric engraving (Joordens et al. 2014). Minerals associated with the shells provided dates of 540,000–430,000 years ago using 40Ar/ 39Ar and luminescence dating methods.

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Ngandong In 1931–1933, the Geological Survey of the Netherlands Indies uncovered 12 cranial and two tibial (shinbone) fossils of Homo erectus along with more than 25,000 nonhuman fossils at Ngandong (Ng on Fig. 1). The fossils were unearthed across an excavation of about 4600 m 2 from gravelly sand (Huffman et al. 2010). This discovery bed is about a half-meter thick in a stratum near the base of flat-lying river-terrace deposits having a stratigraphic thickness of about 3 m (Fig. 4; Ciochon et al. 2009). The fossils were predominantly disarticulated and fragmented, with extinct cattle being the most common among 10 other mammals, turtle, and crocodile.

Fig. 4 Homo erectus bonebed at Ngandong, 1931–1933. (a) The bonebed is exposed across an excavation platform with pedestals at its edge awaiting fossil collection. (b) A Homo erectus skullcap (calotte with basal margins; to the left of the matchbox) before geologist W.F.F. Oppenoorth removed it from the bonebed in March 1932. (After Huffman et al. 2010. © Joke Oppenoorth, The Netherlands)

Ngandong is notable among global paleoanthropological sites because not only is it extraordinary to encounter the fossilized remains of so many hominin individuals in a single river-laid bonebed, but Homo erectus at this site appears to have been contemporaneous with anatomically more evolved Homo species from mainland Eurasia and Africa. Ngandong has been dated using paleontological and geological relationships, as well as radioisotopes. Paleontologically, the Ngandong nonhuman fossil assemblage includes more living taxa than was found at Trinil, e

indicating that Ngandong is the younger of the two accumulations, but the Ngandong assemblage also has extinct elements that do not occur in the modern fauna of Java or even in the youngest premodern assemblages (de Vos 2010). Geologically, the Ngandong deposit is flat lying, rather than being structurally tilted in the way that other Homo erectus formations in eastern Java normally are. On the other hand, the bonebed accumulated along the Solo River streambed before it entrenched to its present-day level, some 20 m below the site. Radioisotopic age estimates vary from 53,000–27,000 years (Swisher et al. 1996) to older than 70,000 years (Yokoyama et al. 2008) and younger than 500,000 years (Indriati et al. 2011). The 1931–1933 Homo erectus discovery bed was re-excavated in 2008 and 2010 in an effort to help clarify its age and explain how so many human individuals came to be embedded in the Solo River sands at this one locale (Ciochon et al. 2009). Flaked stone artifacts have been reported recently from a terrace deposit situated at the same elevation above the Solo River, 5 km south of Ngandong, and the artifact bed appears to date from ~102,000 to 130,000 years ago using red TL on the associated fluvial sediments (van den Bergh et al. 2014). The bones of Homo erectus and the other animals were probably deposited during a flood on the Solo River that originated with rains falling on a stratovolcanic mountain >50 km away; the flooding followed a mass death of large mammals that had aggregated along the Solo River (Huffman et al. 2010). The Ngandong event was one episode in an apparently consistent millionyear-long paleogeographic pattern: the well-watered river valleys of the stratovolcanoes sustained recurring or continuing habitation of Homo erectus, cattle, deer, Stegodon, and other large-bodied herbivores, while rapid volcaniclastic deposition, at times following eruption-related death, promoted quick burial and preservation of skeletal remains (Huffman et al. 2012).

Mojokerto The Mojokerto site was discovered in 1936 approximately 125 km east of Ngandong and Trinil (Mo on Fig. 1). Unlike the previous finds, the Mojokerto site was a small excavation and produced just one, though considerably important, specimen attributable to Homo erectus. The fossil is the cranium of a juvenile, a rare occurrence in early hominin sites. Also, the Mojokerto child skull was embedded in conglomeratic sandstone deposited by a river flowing through a marine delta, making it the only seacoast geological context known for Homo erectus (Huffman et al. 2006). Finally, a probable early Pleistocene age places it among the earliest hominin specimens from Asia. Despite the potential value of establishing an exact absolute date for Mojokerto, radioisotopic and paleomagnetic investigations have so far not achieved this objective. While the accurate dating of Mojokerto and many other Java Homo erectus finds remains a scientific challenge, recent research on the discovery sites improves our understanding of one characteristic of the Homo erectus presence in eastern Java. Andesitic sand and gravel largely make up the Homo erectus formations and form the matrix around the Ngandong, Mojokerto, and Trinil Homo erectus specimens (as it does for many finds from Sangiran Dome, described below). The paleogeographical implications,

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especially clear in the 125-km-long formational outcrop belt that connects Trinil to Mojokerto, are that the eastern Java sites record hundreds of thousands of years of human existence along large rivers flowing off of stratovolcanic peaks in a paleolandscape that was quite similar to eastern Java today (Huffman et al. 2006, 2010, 2012; the volcanic peaks form highest elevations in the Digital Terrain Model that is used as the base map in Fig. 1). The stratovolcanoes of the Homo erectus period, like those in modern Java, often generated perennial river discharge (continuous flow fed by the mountainous concentration of rainfall) as well as periodic eruptions of voluminous volcanic material; the runoff and sediment combined to produce volcanic-derived sedimentary pulses, including slurries and sandy-gravelly floods that ravaged the river valleys for many kilometers downstream (Huffman et al. 2012).

Sangiran Dome Vertebrate fossils have been collected since the mid-nineteenth century at the Sangiran Dome (Sg, Fig. 1), 65 km west of Trinil, but it was not until 1937 that G.H.R von Koenigswald, a paleontologist with the Geological Survey of the Netherland Indies, made the first of many Homo erectus finds there. Today, more than 80 specimens, or over 77% of all Indonesian fossil humans, derive from Sangiran Dome (Larick et al. 2001; Indriati 2004). Among the specimens is the most complete skull of Java Man known (Sangiran 17; Fig. 2). The word “Dome” in the name of the discovery area refers to the ovoid 4 by 8 km geological uplift (a structural dome) that exposes the fossiliferous beds. Many sites and stratigraphic discovery levels occur here, in contrast to the Ngandong, Mojokerto, and Trinil sites, where each discovery came from a single bed extending laterally less than a few hundred meters. Because the finds from Sangiran Dome are so important to the paleoanthropological record of Asia, UNESCO added the “Sangiran Early Man Site (Indonesia)” to the World Heritage List in 1996. Sangiran Dome continues to yield both new Homo erectus finds and scientific insights into the evolutionary history the species. We highlight three examples. First, a 1.5 million-year-old Homo erectus upper jawbone (Fig. 5) from Sangiran Dome, when compared to Homo erectus material from China, Africa, and Georgia (central Asia), as well as with Homo habilis remains from Africa, seems to indicate that Homo erectus in East and Southeast Asia came from two separate populations. Evidently there was an early influx that reached Java and a later one that populated China (Zaim et al. 2011). Second, Sangiran Dome has been the site of a series of excavations in the last 40 years, and one of these (Ngebung) revealed several lithic artifacts and cut-marked bones along a Pleistocene ground surface (Semah and Semah 2006). This discovery is the best evidence yet of how Java Man used stone tools (Fig. 6). Equally, the finds serve to underscore how rare lithic artifacts and cut-marked bones are in Homo erectus beds of eastern Java, even in the prolific bonebeds excavated at Ngandong and Trinil. Third, because the geology of Sangiran Dome has been studied more intensely than other hominin-producing outcrop areas, it offers unique perspectives on the paleoenvironmental context of Java Man. The nature of the ancient soils and carbon isotope studies indicate that the earliest Homo erectus at Sangiran Dome encountered a low-relief lake-margin landscape dominated by moist grasslands with open woodlands in the driest landscape positions, while later in the Pleistocene, the hominin landscape had more riparian forests, local savanna, and open woodland (Bettis et al. 2009; Brasseur et al. 2015).

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Fig. 5 The Bapang maxilla from Sangiran, the earliest firmly dated fossil evidence of Java Man: A, Occlusal view; B, Lateral view (Zaim et al. 2011). © Russell L. Ciochon, Univ. of Iowa

Fig. 6 Stone artifacts from Ngebung, Sangiran: A, retouched flake; B, polyhedron tool. (Courtesy of © by Francois Semah, CNRS, France)

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Several other sites in eastern Java help to show the extent of early hominin occupation in eastern Java. Hominin fossils were found with typical Pleistocene fauna at Patiyam, 90 km north of Sangiran Dome. Paleolithic artifacts (but no hominin fossils) occur near Java’s Indian Ocean coast in Song Terus cave, 75 km southeast of Sangiran Dome (St on Fig. 1; Semah and Semah 2006).

Summary Both the origin and extinction of Java Man are subjects of continuing research. An East Asia source for Java Man was the leading scientific theory until the ascendency of African paleoanthropology during the 1960s. After that, the inferred origins and taxonomy of Homo erectus focused on Africa. Java Man represented a distant way point of an African-sourced dispersal. Interest now rests in a balance between African and Eurasian paleoanthropologic evidence. Particularly influential have been the discoveries of Homo erectus georgicus at Dmanisi, Republic of Georgia; Homo floresiensis, the “hobbit,” of Flores Island, 1000 km east of Java; and the Denisovan populations of Northeast Asia (see Dmanisi in Homo erectus). Homo erectus or related ancestors inhabited western Asia more than 1.8 million years ago, as indicated by the fossils of this age at Dmanisi. Homo erectus likely reached Java by 1.6 million years ago upon evidence from the Sangiran Dome and possibly Mojokerto (Larick et al. 2001; Zaim et al. 2011). Even if Java Man emerged from an eastward-dispersing population of African origin, Homo erectus on the whole might have been most numerous in southern Eurasia with Java Man being one component of this widespread population. Whether Java Man was contemporaneous with Homo sapiens, as it dispersed out of Africa to Southeast Asia and Australia at around 40–60 thousand years ago, is not resolved. Firm dating of the Ngandong Homo erectus offers one opportunity to test this possibility.

Cross-References Denisovans Eugène Dubois Homo erectus Insular Southeast Asia in the Lower Paleolithic

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