Venta Micena Hominid? Horse? Neither deer...

[Greg]

A few exerpts from a newly published report:


“...research at Venta Micena has been embroiled in debate since the discovery in 1982 of a purported hominid cranial fragment (VM-0). According to its discoverers, the specimen can be attributed to Homo sp. and represents the oldest fossil hominid in Europe (Gibert et al., 1983)....
  When the endocranial surface was cleaned, some peculiar anatomical characteristics were noted, including deep digital impressions and an inner laminar sagittal crest which are especially marked just behind ‘‘lambda’’ ... As a consequence, two members of the original team re-identified the piece as belonging to an equid (Agustı´ & Moya`-Sola`, 1987), which led to a disagreement....
  Following detailed comparisons, the taxonom[y] of VM-0 is now clear. It is not a hominid and it is not an equid. ... The Orce specimen is a female of a large ruminant without cranial appendages....
  The mistaken taxonomic assignment stems from a misidentification of the cranial anatomy. The landmark previously identified as lambda is really bregma, and the
parietals are frontals.”


Martý´nez-Navarro, Bienvenido.  The skull of Orce: parietal bones or frontal bones? Journal of Human Evolution (2002) 42, 265–270

[Taxidea]

So this means those tests on the immunospecificity of
the albumin in the fossil which supposedly identified it
as a hominid are so much wishful thinking.

See

Borja, Concepcion; García-Pacheco, Marcos; Olivares, Enrique G;  
Scheuenstuhl, Gary; Lowenstein, Jerold M.  Immunospecificity of  
albumin detected in 1.6 million-year-old fossils from
Venta Micena in Orce, Granada, Spain.   Am J Phys Anthropol           1997  103: 4  433-441  

Rick Wagler

[Greg]

There are different levels of difficulty here.  First, if one reads these papers, there seems to be a subtext as to whether or not hominids were present based on  fossil bone evidence, independently of stone artifacts.  This suggests that there is some question about the stone artifacts themselves.  If there is not, then I'm not sure why the hypotheses are being developed as they are (i.e., that knowing if this is a human bone or not is important to the question of human occupation!).

At a finer level, it is true that these antibody tests use very small or short signals (only a few binding points), which is their advantage in time-ravaged assemblages.  It must be therefore true that convergence is possible, i.e., that some distantly related animal will have almost the same binding properties as another, and thus give false positive results sometimes.  

Yet, these reports indicate that the method should be questionable only in reference to primates, not other mammals.....so this should not be a problem.

In order to be sure, the protein-based investigations have to be redone using cervid products, to rule out convergence, I would think.

And, there is the possibility of human DNA contamination (that would be interesting) or that the morphologists are wrong (maybe it will turn out to be a dolphin pelvic bone???!!!)

I also wonder if the individual can be sexed at the molecular level, using the presumption that it is human and separately the presumption that it is a deer, because the morphology suggests that if it is a deer, it is a doe (a deer, a female deer.... ).  There are DNA based techniques that supposedly can sex an individual even if there is a lot of degradation.  If it is a female it may still be a human, or more likely, it will be either a "male" or a "we don't know" (ie you look for the Y-chromosomes).  At least there is a chance of falsifying the DoReMe hypothesis (that it is a female deer).