Homo heidelbergensis

A key ancestor of modern humans

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The main chapter has already presented the great French landmarks of this species: the Mauer mandible that gave it its name, the skull of Tautavel Man, or the dwellings of Terra Amata and Menez-Dregan. But Homo heidelbergensis extends well beyond French borders. Two sites, one in England, the other in southern Africa, allow us to go further — and raise a question science has still not settled: is this really a single species?

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🏹 Boxgrove: hunting horses, 500,000 years ago

The site of Boxgrove, in southern England, has been excavated since 1982. It has yielded a partial human tibia and two teeth, dated to around 500,000 years and attributed to Homo heidelbergensis — the tibia is the only postcranial element of this species ever found in Northern Europe, now kept at the Natural History Museum in London.

The site also preserves the remains of a horse killed for its meat. Study of these bones by researchers Simon Parfitt and Silvia Bello revealed that several of them had been used as “retouchers,” that is, as tools used to shape flint pieces by percussion — direct proof that big-game hunting was already accompanied by methodical exploitation of animal by-products, bone included, not just soft tissue.

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🌍 Kabwe, the skull that blurs the boundaries

In 1921, in the lead and zinc mine of Broken Hill, in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), the Swiss miner Tom Zwiglaar uncovered an exceptionally well-preserved fossil skull. First attributed to a distinct species, Homo rhodesiensis, this fossil — the first archaic human fossil ever discovered on the African continent — was later assigned by many researchers to Homo heidelbergensis, without its exact position reaching consensus.

Its anatomy forms a genuine mosaic: a broad face, thick brow ridges, a sloping forehead, but a cranial capacity of 1300 cm³, comparable to that of modern humans. A recent dating has, moreover, upended the accepted chronology: the Kabwe skull would be only 299,000 years old, plus or minus 25,000 years — a much later age than expected, which brings this African fossil closer to the period when Homo sapiens was just beginning to emerge on the same continent.

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🧩 One species, or several? The debate still open

These two sites illustrate a broader difficulty: to this day, Homo heidelbergensis has no consensual definition within the scientific community. Two positions clash. The first groups under a single taxon all the European and African fossils of the Middle Pleistocene, relying on their overall morphological resemblances. The second prefers to distinguish Homo heidelbergensis, reserved for European fossils such as those of Mauer, Tautavel, or Boxgrove, from Homo rhodesiensis, which would designate African fossils such as that of Kabwe — judged, on certain criteria, closer to Homo sapiens. This second position is notably defended by researchers at the Musée de l’Homme, in Paris.

More recent work goes even further: paleoanthropologists gathered around Jean-Jacques Hublin suggest that the set of fossils today grouped under this name may not form a coherent species, but instead covers several distinct populations brought together for reasons of classificatory convenience rather than proven biological kinship. The name Homo heidelbergensis, far from being a simple chronological marker, thus remains a subject of research in its own right.

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🧠 Key points

• Boxgrove (England, ~500,000 years) has yielded the only long bone of Homo heidelbergensis known in Northern Europe, along with horse bones used as tools
• The Kabwe skull (Zambia), discovered in 1921 by Tom Zwiglaar, has been redated to only 299,000 ± 25,000 years, a major chronological surprise
• The scientific community has no consensual definition of Homo heidelbergensis: some distinguish a European form from an African one (Homo rhodesiensis)
• Recent work (Hublin et al.) even suggests the species may not form a coherent biological group