engleski

The Implications of Variation in Late Pleistocene Levantine Crania for Understanding the Pattern of Human Evolution

This paper examines the variability in a sample of Late Pleistocene fossil human crania found in the Southern Levant, in present day Israel. This sample (n=13) is comprised of both Neandertals from Tabun and Amud, and the remains from Skhul and Qafzeh that are considered predecessors of modern humans. Many authors describe the heterogeneity of the Levantine sample as unusual, greater than what modern populations could be expected to exhibit, and many believe they represent groups of different human species. This study focuses on whether the magnitude of Levantine variation is really unusual. To demonstrate the Levantine sample variation is really caused by taxonomic differences, the Levantines should, at the minimum, exhibit a greater magnitude of variation than expected in a comparable modern population of mixed ancestry from a confined geographic area and limited time span. Smaller magnitude of variation would indicate that the Levantine variation is not from species mixture ; it involved a mixture of human populations. The issue is addressed in a statistical, comparative context. The null hypothesis is tested by comparing the Levant sample’s non-metric cranial variation with the cranial variation in 100 mixed-ancestry medieval crania from the Pannonian Plain (fourth to eighth century A.D.). Dichotomous, binomial responses were collected for 67 traits. The fossil Levantine sample was compared to the resampled Pannonian distribution to test whether the magnitude and variance of the Levant data are expected within it. The results show that the magnitude of the variation in the Levantine sample is not unusual when compared to the Pannonian sample, and the null hypothesis of admixture of different populations cannot be refuted. These results are strongly supported by the recent ongoing advances in the study of ancient and modern nDNA.

Late Pleistocene fossil variation; non-metrics; Levant

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