Introduction
Perched atop a forested promontory, in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains in the Republic of Georgia, lies the paleolithic site of Dmanisi. The 1.8 Ma fossil site lies buried beneath the ruins of a medieval city, overlooking the modern farming village of Patara Dmanisi. Archaeological excavations at the medieval site serendipitously unearthed the first fossils, opening the site to paleontological excavation beginning in 1983 and the first archaeological discoveries in 1984. Dmanisi rose to prominence with hominin fossil discoveries in the 1990s and 2000s, becoming one of the richest sites for early Homo erectus.
The Dmanisi hominins (Fig. 1) are among the oldest specimens of Homo erectus yet recovered, contemporary with the oldest material from Africa. Stone tools (Fig. 2) there have been found in sediments directly overlying the Mashavera basalt, dated by argon-argon methods to 1.85 Ma; the fossil material and other lithics have been recovered from a subsequent...
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Further Reading
Lordkipanidze, D., A.Vekua, R. Ferring, G.P. Rightmire, J. Agusti, G. Kiladze, A. Mouskhelishvili, M. Nioradze, M.S. Ponce de León, M. Tappen & C.P. Zollikofer. 2005. Anthropology: the earliest toothless hominin skull. Nature 434: 717-8.
Lordkipanidze, D., A.Vekua, R. Ferring, G.P. Rightmire, C.P. Zollikofer, M.S. Ponce de León, J. Agusti, G. Kiladze, A. Mouskhelishvili, M. Nioradze & M. Tappen. 2006. A fourth hominin skull from Dmanisi, Georgia. The Anatomical Record 288: 1146-57.
Rightmire G.P., A.P. Van Arsdale & D. Lordkipanidze. 2008. Variation in the mandibles from Dmanisi, Georgia. Journal of Human Evolution 54: 904-8.
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Pontzer, H., Antón, S.C., Lordkipanidze, D. (2014). Dmanisi Hominins and Archaeology. In: Smith, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-0465-2_711
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