H & M

Homo heidelbergensis is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans in the genus Homo of the Middle Pleistocene , known from fossils found in Southern Africa, East Africa and Europe. African H. heidelbergensis is also known as Homo rhodesiensis .The skulls of this species share features with both Homo erectus and anatomically modern Homo sapiens; its brain was nearly as large as that of Homo sapiens. The first discovery – a mandible – was made in 1908 at Mauer near Heidelberg in Germany where it was described and named by Otto Schoetensack, but the vast majority of H. heidelbergensis fossils have been found since 1996. The Sima de los Huesos cave at Atapuerca in northern Spain holds particularly rich layers of deposits where excavations were still in progress as of 2015.H. heidelbergensis was dispersed throughout Eastern and Southern Africa as well as Europe . Its exact relation both to the earlier Homo antecessor and Homo ergaster, and to the later lineages of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans is unclear.Homo sapiens has been proposed as derived from H. heidelbergensis via Homo rhodesiensis, present in East and North Africa from around 400,000 years ago. The correct assignment of many fossils to a particular chronospecies is difficult and often differences in opinion ensue among paleoanthropologists due to the absence of universally accepted dividing lines between Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo rhodesiensis and Neanderthals. Homo rhodesiensis is often considered a late form of H. heidelbergensis. The taxonomy of Middle Pleistocene archaic humans remains under active revision as new evidence is evaluated. It is uncertain whether H. heidelbergensis is ancestral to Homo sapiens, as a fossil gap in Africa between 400,000 and 260,000 years ago obscures the presumed derivation of H. sapiens from H. rhodesiensis. Genetic analysis of the Sima de los Huesos fossils seems to suggest that H. heidelbergensis in its entirety should be included in the Neanderthal lineage, as pre-Neanderthal or archaic Neanderthal or early Neanderthal, while the divergence time between the Neanderthal and modern lineages has been pushed back to before the emergence of H. heidelbergensis, to about 600,000 to 800,000 years ago, the approximate time of disappearance of Homo antecessor.The delineation between early H. heidelbergensis and H. erectus is also unclear.
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