Introduction to special issue: The biotic context of the Early Pleistocene hominins from Dmanisi (Georgia, southern Caucasus)

The village of Dmanisi lies about 85 km Southwest of the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. In the Middle Ages, Dmanisi was one of the most prominent cities situated on the routes of the ancient Silk Roads. The region has thus long intrigued archaeologists, who have been excavating the ruins of a medieval citadel since the 1930s. The first trace that the site might be also of significance for paleontology became evident in 1983 when the paleontologist Abesalom Vekua identified the remains of a long-extinct rhinoceros found in one of the grain storage pits of the medieval population. These pits have opened a window into prehistory. The following year, during further paleontological excavations, primitive stone tools came to light, raising the tantalizing possibility of finding hominin fossil remains.

In 1991, the first international team established by the Georgian Museum with Romish-Germanishes Zentalmuseum (Germany) was gathered for the Dmanisi excavations. Even though the faunal remains were found together with stone tools, no human remains had surfaced till the very last day of the 1991 excavation season. On the 24th of September 1991, a hominin mandible was discovered underneath the cranium of a saber-toothed cat. The results of the study of the lower jawbone carried out under the supervision of the late Paleontologist Leo Gabunia provoked much discussion in the scientific world, with many scholars skeptical about the age and taxonomy of the Dmanisi hominins. Since then, Dmanisi placed Georgia on the map of human evolution, and it is today one of the most celebrated paleoanthropological sites in the world.

Cutting-edge scientific approaches are now used to study the site and the fossils of Dmanisi. Remains of Stephanorhinus from Dmanisi were the first specimens from the Early Pleistocene on which protein sequence alignment analysis (i.e., phylogenetic information obtained from the tooth enamel) was successfully performed (Cappellini et al., 2019). This research has launched a new molecular method to examine extinct species that are several million years old, thus breaking the time limits generally accessible by DNA analysis.

Research on Dmanisi hominins (Lordkipanidze et al., 2013; Margvelashvili et al., 2013) has set a new benchmark for understanding early hominin variation. Owing to the excellent preservation status and richness of the fossil individuals belonging to different age groups of the same paleodeme, the magnitude of intraspecific variation and the role of aging on that variation has been assessed. Moreover, the effects of aging and tooth wear-related dentognathic remodeling on facial morphological changes can be significant and thus must be taken into account while assessing taxonomy.

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