A Profile of KNM-ER 1813: The State of Early Homo from the Specimen’s Perspective

Abstract

In the paleoanthropology community, there is much debate about how to tackle the issue that the earliest Homo specimens pose. In general, there is a great variety of cranial morphology represented in the fossil record, but KNM-ER 1813 poses a special problem because it defines the low-end of Homo cranial capacity. The paper presents the major arguments of the debate by discussing both the history of the science and the major theoretical perspectives paleoanthropologists use to categorize these troublesome fossils.