Maba Man

Maba Man (simplified Chinese: 马坝人; traditional Chinese: 馬壩人; pinyin: mǎbà-rén) is the pre-modern hominin whose remains were discovered in 1958 in caves near the town called Maba, near Shaoguan city in the north part of Guangdong province, China.[1][2]

The Maba Men lived in caves at Lion Rock, near Maba.[1] The site is now a park and tourist attraction including the possibility to visit the cave and a museum nearby.

Although described at the site as "ape-men", the Maba Men were not really very apelike and were comparable to European Neanderthals. Maba Man is an early Homo sapiens that was discovered in 1958 by farmers in Guangdong, China. There is a lot of undiscovered information regarding this species because of the only recent discovery of the bones. The bones were found in cave and were found to be 130,000 years old. Once the bones were found, there was an excavation conducted to get as much evidence of this species as possible. As there are more findings of Maba Man, there are more discoveries of how life was 100,000 years ago.

Maba Man was discovered in 1958 in China and was classified as a Homo sapiens. The scientists had found that the skull had a very coarse superciliary arches and an extremely contracted orbital surface. The frontal bone was longer than the parietal bone. All these indicate the primitive character of Homo erectus, although the skull had thin walls and the brain was larger than Beijing Man.[3] There, still to this day, is not much information based on this particular species because of the information that has yet to be discovered about them. The Maba man lived during the stone age, which was 129 thousand years ago.

• There is a sense of pride when it comes to these types of discoveries because they have the right to claim an ancient fossil to be their own. The Maba Man played a huge role in proving how momentous of a discovery that they had made. The cultural influence that the Maba Man fossil discovery had on China created aura around the Maba Man discovery. Many cultural relics of pottery and stone artifacts were unearthed, but it was soon to be found out that it was created by the generation of the Maba Man. The Chinese uncovered the past, which in a sense, combined and linked the past and the present. The world can now regard the Shixia Culture as being responsible for yet another channel between the past and the culture. Experts universally note that this discovery was of great significance to the study of human evolution because of the many different changes that scientists found in the bones of Maba Man. The scientists were able to distinguish the Homo erectus from Homo sapiens because of the data that Maba Man gave them through their bones that were discovered.

Historical Time Frame

Maba Man statue. This is what Maba man is thought to have looked like 130,000 years ago.

To architects, the time frame in which they lived in was during the Middle to Late Pleistocene Epoch. In China, the discovery of the Maba Man fossil was the most important ancient fossil discovery since the “China Man” fossil discovery. The relics of late middle New Stone Age of "Shixia Culture", which occurred in 4000-6000 years ago, were found in Shiziyan in 1962[4]. It is now publicly known as one of the most important relics in all of the Zhujiang Valley. When the fossils were originally found in Guangdong, China near Maba village, they thought that the species was a West Asian Neanderthal. The scientists believed that this was the case because there were animal bones that were found near the Maba Man bones that dated back to at least 130,000 years ago. However, they were quick to find out that Maba Man was not West Asian Neanderthal because the cranial structure lacked the unique anatomic features of the Neanderthal, which is why the classification of Maba Man was difficult to determine. The animal bones that were also found in the same cave as Maba Man were found to be from the Ice Age.

Farmers found an ancient Maba cranium in 1958, near a Chinese village named Maba. Maba Man was labeled an intermediate in form between Homo erectus and H. sapiens, the remains are referred by many authorities to archaic H. sapiens or to an Asian extension of H. heidelbergensis.[5] As the scientists did more research on the Maba cranium, they found that the fossils consisted of a skull cap and parts of the right upper face, with parts of the nose also still attached. The scientists saw a connection with the Homo erectus because the brow ridges were pronounced, forming an arch over each eye and the bones of the brain-case were low and thick. [5] The scientist were able to conclude that the brain size of Maba Man was bigger than that of the Homo erectus because of the measurments and tests that they conducted with the fossils.

• 

  Maba Man bone
  The Smithsonian National Museum has labeled Maba Man as apart of the Homo heidelbergensis species. This particular species is known to have a very large browridge, and a larger braincase and flatter face than older early human species. It was the first early human species to live in colder climates; their short, wide bodies were likely an adaptation to conserving heat.[6] It is known that this was one of the species to really break ground. They would routinely hunt large animals and would build shelters out of wood and stone.