A Study of Species Hypotheses and Hominid Variability

Abstract

The five crania recovered from the Dmanisi site of the Former Soviet Republic of Georgia represent the earliest hominid fossils found outside of Africa (Gabunia et al. 2000). The site provides a sampling of hominid variability at a critical time period (1.77 mya) (Gabunia et al. 2000). Interpretations of this variability, however, are mixed. Some workers suggest that the fossils represent a single, dimorphic hominid population (Van Arsdale and Lordkipanidze 2012; Macaluso 2010; Lordkipanidze et al. 2013; Rightmire et al. 2017), while others have suggested that, by virtue of there being high levels of variation between the fossil specimens, the Dmanisi assemblage contains more than one species (Martinon-Torres et al. 2008; Bermudez de Castro et al. 2014; Schwartz et al. 2014). This paper takes a look at the literature associated with both sides of this argument, and comments on the implications of these arguments on the use of variability within paleoanthropological studies.