Background

Homo heidelbergensis

The jawbone found in 1907 at Mauer near Heidelberg made the city the namesake of an entire species of early humans.

A jawbone from a sand pit

On 21 October 1907 the workman Daniel Hartmann found a human lower jaw some 24 metres down in a sand pit at Mauer, about ten kilometres south-east of Heidelberg. It was not entirely luck: the Heidelberg anthropologist Otto Schoetensack had been asking the pit workers to watch out for bones for years.

Schoetensack described the jaw scientifically in 1908 and gave it the name it still carries: Homo heidelbergensis. The original, known as Mauer 1, belongs to Heidelberg University.

Why the find mattered

The jaw is massive and chinless, yet carries strikingly human-looking teeth. That combination made it the key exhibit for a question that was open around 1900: what did the ancestor look like that led to both Neanderthals and modern humans?

Current dating puts the find at roughly 600,000 years old - one of the oldest traces of human settlement in Central Europe, and the reason an entire species is named after a city on the Neckar.