The Cranial Metric Diversity of Chinese Homo erectus

For the past decade, the morphological variations of Asian Homo erectus, and their significance in the origin and evolution of Homo erectus in Asia have attracted great attentions in the paleoanthropological research around the world. Some colleagues have suggested that both the morphologican and metric cranial features of Zhoukoudian Homo erectus possess different patterns from the African and other Asian specimens assigned to Homo erectus. Some researchers even doubt the traditional opinion that the cranial features of Zhoukoudian specimens be regarded as the typical morphological pattern of the Homo erectus around the world. To further explore this problem, multivariate analyses were used to the cranial metric data of 33 Homo erectus specimens found in Africa and Eurasia. Our results indicate that the mainland Asian Homo erectus of Zhoukoudian and Nanjing exhibits unique cranial metric pattern not shared by African and Indonesian Homo erectus. Zhoukoudian and Nanjing specimens are characterized by a wide midvault and relatively narrow frontal and occipital bones, while the crania of Indonesian and African Homo erectus have relatively broad frontal and occipital dimensions compared to their midvaults. Our analysis also reveals that the Homo erectus cranium found in Hexian of China resembles Indonesian and African specimens in metric pattern, and obviously differs from thossed of Zhoukoudian and Nanjing. Based on these findings, a series of problems including the evolution of Homo erectus cranial metric features, the characteristics of Zhoukoudian Homo erectus crania, and the temporal and regional variations of Asian Homo erectus are discussed.