Homo Heidelbergensis

Homo heidelbergensis is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic humans in the genus Homo, which radiated in the Middle Pleistocene from about 700,000 to 300,000 years ago.[note 2] African H. heidelbergensis has 4 subspecies: H. h. heidelbergensis, H. h. daliensis, H. h. rhodesiensis, and H. h. steinheimensis.[1] The derivation of H. sapiens from H. rhodesiensis has often been proposed, but is obscured by a fossil gap from 400–260 kya.[note 3]The species was originally named Homo heidelbergensis due to the skeleton's first discovery near Heidelberg, Germany.[3]

The first discovery—a mandible—was made in 1907 by Otto Schoetensack.[3][4] The skulls of this species share features with both H. erectus and modern humans; its brain was nearly as large as that of modern humans.[5] 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 2018.[6][7][8][9]

H. heidelbergensis was dispersed throughout Eastern and Southern Africa (Ethiopia, Namibia, Southern Africa) as well as Europe (England, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, Spain).[10] Its exact relation both to the earlier H. antecessor and H. ergaster, and to the later species Neanderthals, Denisovans, and modern humans is unclear.[11][12][13]

Modern humans have been proposed to derive from H. heidelbergensis via H. rhodesiensis, present in East and North Africa from around 400 kya.[14][15]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 (autapomorphies) between H. erectus, H. heidelbergensis, and Neanderthals.

It is uncertain whether H. heidelbergensis is ancestral to modern humans, as a fossil gap in Africa between 400–260 thousand years ago obscures the presumed derivation of H. sapiens from H. rhodesiensis.[note 3] Genetic analysis of the Sima de los Huesos fossils (Meyer et al. 2016) 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 the disappearance of Homo antecessor.[16][17]

The delineation between early H. heidelbergensis and H. erectus is also unclear.