Hoedjiespunt is a

Middle Pleistocene The Chibanian, widely known by its previous designation of Middle Pleistocene, is an age in the international geologic timescale or a stage in chronostratigraphy, being a division of the Pleistocene Epoch within the ongoing Quaternary Period. Th ...

aged hominid fossil-bearing site on the West coast of

South Africa South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa (RSA), is the Southern Africa, southernmost country in Africa. It is bounded to the south by of coastline that stretch along the Atlantic Ocean, South Atlantic and Indian Oceans; to the ...

, near the town of

Saldanha Bay Saldanha Bay ( af, Saldanhabaai) is a natural harbour on the south-western coast of South Africa. The town that developed on the northern shore of the bay, also called Saldanha, was incorporated with five other towns into the Saldanha Bay Local ...

. The site is an ancient brown hyena lair dug into the side of a sand dune, located on a peninsula overlooking the

Atlantic Ocean The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's five oceans, with an area of about . It covers approximately 20% of Earth's surface and about 29% of its water surface area. It is known to separate the " Old World" of Africa, Europe ...

. The site became fossilized under a large calcrete formation around 280,000 years ago, at which time it was likely several kilometers from the ocean.

Fossil discovery

Prior to the early 1990s, Hoedjiespunt had been known for several years as a fossil locality after roadworks had exposed abundant bone when a grader dug into a fossilized sand dune. A number of very fragile fossils were subsequently recovered in the initial search. In 1993, a single fossil hominid tooth was found in fragments eroding from the surface of the deposit, prompting further excavations which recovered many thousands of fossils, among them teeth, skull fragments and a

tibia The tibia (; ), also known as the shinbone or shankbone, is the larger, stronger, and anterior (frontal) of the two bones in the leg below the knee in vertebrates (the other being the fibula, behind and to the outside of the tibia); it connects ...

shaft from a juvenile hominid attributed to ''

Homo heidelbergensis ''Homo heidelbergensis'' (also ''H. sapiens heidelbergensis''), sometimes called Heidelbergs, is an extinct species or subspecies of archaic human which existed during the Middle Pleistocene. It was subsumed as a subspecies of '' H. erectus'' i ...

''. However, Stynder et al. (2001) suggest that the evidence from the mandibular incisors from HDP1 is "insufficient to point to closer affinities of the HDP1 sample with either African or European Middle Pleistocene Hominids."

References

* *{{cite journal, last1=Stynder, first1=Deano D., last2=Moggi-Cecchi, first2=Jacopo, last3=Berger, first3=Lee R., last4=Parkington, first4=John E., title=Human mandibular incisors from the late Middle Pleistocene locality of Hoedjiespunt 1, South Africa, journal=Journal of Human Evolution, date=2001, volume=41, issue=5, pages=369–383, doi=10.1006/jhev.2001.0488, url=http://www.profleeberger.com/files/hoedjiespuntincisorsb.pdf, pmid=11681859 Archaeological sites in South Africa Pleistocene paleontological sites of Africa Archaeological sites of Southern Africa

Fossil discovery

Related links

References